


The Idiot

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume IV [6]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, M/M, Metafiction, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-10 23:59:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7013923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our heroes & heroines embark on adventures that take them to exciting new places across Europe. Meanwhile in Paris, more musketeers books are being written, not to everybody's satisfaction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Letters from Hell

**Paris, 1847**

Unlike Athos and Aramis, who were used to slipping into new aliases every few decades, I only ever changed my name with a new incarnation. It was a new experience to retain the old face and body and assume a different persona after rising from the dead. It was even weirder for Marion, who had never changed her name at all, claiming that a courtesan was a mere footnote in the annals of history and that nobody would ever pay it any attention.

This time, Discord had put his foot down. “You had a drama written about you, you… fairy!” he had pronounced with Olympian thunder behind his words. “Your name appears in M. de Vigny’s novel – who, as I understand, was your lover – and in Alex’s! At some point, people _will_ notice.”

Marion shrugged. “It is very obviously a stage name, my dear count. A pseudonym that I assumed in honour of the famous seventeenth century courtesan. You know everything about noms de guerre, don’t you?”

Athos ground his teeth. “Just… change your bloody name. And by that I don’t mean changing the spelling to ‘de Lorm’.”

“Not even if it’s _Blanche_ de Lorm?”

“Oh Hera’s tits!”

“Very well,” Marion conceded and smiled. “I always liked the sound of ‘Berchta’.”

I laughed, while thunderbolts blazed in Discord’s eyes. “Berchta? She of the Wild Hunt? The ‘bright one’, the white-robed female spirit who pursues mortals in a deadly chase? Oh, my love, how utterly delightful!” I kissed her on the cheek, watching Athos struggle to rein in his passions. He looked so exasperated and wretched that I took pity on the poor godling. “Why not make it ‘Bertha’, chérie? You retain the sentiment, but make it sound slightly more Christian. Which is all that Discord wants.”

He rolled his eyes and his shoulder sagged – in relief or defeat, I couldn’t tell.

Meanwhile, Aramis stood still like a marble statue, staring at the passport that Grimley had handed to him with exquisite politeness. He looked up, his black eyes burning in the white face.

“Doctor _Antinous_ Szimara?”

***

**Venice, 1850**

_Sarò, lo giuro a te ed a Dio,_  
_Delle tue gesta imitator._  
_A Carlo Magno gloria e onor!_

The baritone’s voice rose over the choir, bringing the climactic final chords of the third act of Verdi’s _Ernani_ to a bombastic close, just as I shoved my hand between Aramis’ legs and squeezed. In the darkness of our opera box, he turned his head towards me and sucked in my lower lip.

“We should go now, count, before the next act ends in your tears,” he whispered to the sound of rollicking Venetian applause.

“I did not cry at the end of _Ernani_ ,” I frowned and squeezed harder around the rapidly growing flesh beneath the cloth of his trousers. “I simply find Verdi to be very _rousing_.”

“No? I could have sworn there was moisture in your eye, my love.”

“It may have been due to an overabundance of beauty, Aramis.”

“Indeed? I’m becoming increasingly concerned over your feelings for Signor Verdi.”

“ _Chyortik_!” I nipped at the skin of his neck. “If anything should happen to Verdi…”

“What?” he laughed. “Will you throw me into Tartarus, you patron deity of Italian composers?”

“I shall be forced to seriously consider it,” I replied with a grave look on my face.

He laughed. “Come!” and grabbed my hand, hurrying me out of the opera box and down the stairs, to La Fenice’s vestibule, and out the door into a starry Venetian night. I did not object: end of act three was a rather good way to close the evening on a high note, before everyone succumbed to destiny or stupidity and died embarrassingly. 

We slipped into a covered gondola, down one of the dark canals to the sound of the bells of the Campanile telling time in the distance. I pulled Aramis in for another kiss, our bodies coming together, creating a furnace of restless anticipation.

“Athos,” he whispered in between kisses, “we need to talk… about your favorite nephew.”

“Not _now_ , Aramis,” I hissed and pulled on his cravat, battling my way to the soft and fragrant skin of his neck. 

My blood still pulsated with the last chords of victory: the King had uncovered the conspiracy, pardoned the guilty, and Elvira with Ernani were going to be married and live happily ever after (as long as no one ever watched the fourth act). My fingers wrapped around the velvety shaft of my beloved’s cock and a soft moan escaped his lips, which I eagerly swallowed.

Behind us at the helm, the unflappable gondolier struck up a jolly mariner’s song, to drown out the sounds of our lovemaking.

***

The letters had started to arrive when we were in Naples, following us up and down the Amalfi coast, from the bluffs of Capri at Villa Jovis to the very peak of Mount Vesuvius. Underneath the lemon trees, I would lie with my head in Aramis’ lap and listen to him discussing the latest Parisian news with the nymph and the fairy.

“Porthos ought to join us,” Marion purred. “It is much sunnier here than in Paris.”

“He’s losing his mind, poor dear,” Marie giggled.

 _I am very pleased to report that my boy has embarked upon yet another sequel_ , Porthos wrote. _It is named after your imaginary son, Athos. Although I still cannot fathom how you and Marie could have made an offspring such as this one. Surely, yours would have been giving it to half the court of France as well as England. Speaking of England, did you really allow Monk’s men to set fire to the house with you inside? That seems rather obvious, even for you. I hope Alex was making that part up. By the way, are you and Marie planning on making offspring? If you do, do **not** name it ‘Raoul’! I cannot see this ending well._

The letters were always accompanied by the latest editions of _Le Siècle_ so that we could ourselves behold what we had wrought. 

“Why is Alex doing this?” I asked Aramis.

“He needs to eat,” my beloved shrugged. “He is, after all, merely mortal.” His teeth shone in the Amalfi sunlight and he adjusted his smoked lenses over his black eyes. I had a feeling they would become a permanent fixture.

News of Alexandre’s literary successes followed us up to Rome and later to Tivoli, where I insisted on visiting the Villa Adriana.

“We shouldn’t have come here, Grimley,” I heard Aramis say as I looked upon the placid waters of the canopy pond. The accurately attired statue of Ares still graced the surrounding gardens, following me with his gaze across time and space. If I closed my eyes, I could still see this place as it was back then, when I had walked these alleys with Hadrian. “Go on, ask him to come away.”

“You ask him, Master Aramis.”

“No! If he’s going to beat one of us, it may as well be you.”

I unclasped my hands from behind my back and turned towards them. “I’m _fine_ ,” I assured in a tone that spoke of anything but.

“Kyrios, it isn’t too late,” the gnat informed me, eyeing the waters of the pond. “I can still dig him up and resurrect him for you. You Know Whom.”

“Let it go, Grimley,” I smiled and walked away from the site of Antinous’ secret final resting place.

 _I do not understand why there is so much court intrigue,_ poor Porthos wrote. _Does the audience actually care about Malicorne and Manicamp? I cannot tell which is which. Although I was quite glad to learn of the integral part I played, personally, in the reinforcing of Belle Île. I do not recall Aramis having gout, however. Would you ask him for me?_

“Gout! _Gout_?” Aramis’ fangs dropped. “I’ll show him fucking gout!”

“Be calm, flittermouse. It’s just a story,” I said, slithering in between his thighs and deploying distraction maneuvers.

“We must return to France immediately so that I can eat him!” Aramis insisted. “He gave me four missing teeth! I want him to count all of mine after I bite off his fingers!”

I buried my face between his legs and did not come up until I turned him into a muttering, boneless mess.

It was sometime in 1848 that we got news that Marie’s exploits as a courtesan had been immortalized by Junior, in a rather maudlin piece known as _La Dame aux Camelias_. 

_He calls her ‘Marguerite’_ , Porthos informed us, _but something tells me that he meant to write Marie. Perhaps he had forgotten - human memories are not as robust as, well, you know. Incidentally, he has the courtesan’s body exhumed in the novel. I cannot tell whether this is a veiled threat, but better not tell Aramis, in case he get peckish._

“This novel is shit,” I pronounced. “It will never catch popularity. Obviously, the Titanic talents get diluted with human blood over generations.” 

I may not have been wrong about the quality of the writing, but I had somehow failed to grasp the fascination of the moribund human mind with the image of the consumptive courtesan.

“Don’t be _rude_ , Athos,” Marie chided me while I apologetically kissed her hand. 

“The whore who gives up her life and riches for the love of a man who cannot support her,” I laughed. “Marie, you married one of the richest men in Europe.”

“It’s romantic! You have no sense of romance!”

“You’re right,” I agreed, scooping her up while she laughed and twirling her around the loggia. “Romance is not my forte.”

“Put me down, you beast!”

By the time we had come to Venice, Porthos’ letters had become increasingly disturbed.

_I find it odd that this novel does not seem to have an end. It has sprawled on seemingly on purpose, as if he does not wish to ever finish it. Now, I know you had forbidden me to have direct contact with my nutbug, but I had to make inquiries. I finally cornered his collaborator, that Maquet fellow, at one of the local soirées, and pressed him a bit on the topic. According to Maquet, my boy has concocted all kinds of ploys, up to and including feigning writer’s block, to avoid finishing the novel - or should I say **novels** \- which has at this point spanned several years. Occasionally, he has been observed to mutter ‘They will return! I will summon them back!’ with the wide-eyed look of a man possessed. Could it be, my cousin, that after all these years he is only doing this to lure you back to Paris? You have often said yourself that you are, at the very least, his Muse._

“He _hates_ me, Athos,” Aramis whined from our bed, while I looked out upon the Venetian rooftops from our balcony. The pigeons swarmed over Piazza San Marco and the faintest scent of mildew which would eventually permeate the entire city reached my nostrils from the canals below. “He hates me and he _loves_ you to the point of ridiculousness.”

“You’re right, flittermouse,” I grinned while my back was still turned to him. “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever be bothered with me.”

“Oh _shut_ up, that’s not what I meant! Come back to bed!” 

“You’re just going to insist that I let you eat him again.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way to distract me from such thoughts.”

I put down my cordial of Limoncello from Amalfi and returned to the bed, where the sheets were still being kept warm by my well-fed Wallachian abomination.

“You’re so beautiful,” I sighed, looking down at him, “sometimes I forget to breathe.”

His eyebrow moved and then his thigh and then the sheets parted and his hand beckoned me forth. Italy was amazing.

***

**Venice, 1850**

The canals reeked of brackish water and rotting algae. I wrinkled my nose and fanned myself languidly, leaning over the railing of a bridge and watching a gondola slowly approach. Marion watched it carelessly over her shoulder; her white dress glowed in the rays of the setting sun, and her face was concealed in the shadow cast by the brim of her hat.

Beside her, Bartleby stood perfectly still: the picture of an obedient servant.

“Are they in this one?” Marion asked, pointing at the gondola with the tip of her parasol.

I nodded.

“How do you know? Did the nymphs of Venice get any messages through to you while I wasn’t looking?”

“No self-respecting nymph would live in waters that are as filthy as these.” I narrowed my eyes at the sludge slopping under the bridge, where mosquitoes were congregating in buzzing clouds. “No, I don’t need anyone to tell me. When they are on the water, I can feel them.”

“That must be nice,” Marion said. “Being able to feel Discord like that. Can you feel what they are doing?”

“Stop it,” I muttered. The gondola was almost beneath the bridge. Marion nodded at the leprechaun, and he whistled. Instantly, Athos’ head popped out from beneath the baldachin of the gondola, and he looked up at us, his face inscrutable.

“Come up,” I mouthed at him. He nodded, reached into the shadows, and pulled out Aramis, who slithered out like a black serpent. The gondolier stopped the boat and god and demon leapt on dry land.

“How can we be of service?” Aramis asked with a bow.

“We should swap,” Marion informed them. “Marie and I take the gondola, you two walk.”

“We could all take the gondola,” Athos said.

“You are such a romantic, count!” I sighed. “But alas, we need you to be our beaters. You will have to drive them into our… arms.”

“Bartleby has the address. It’s not far.”

“We don’t have to chase them out of the house,” Athos objected. “We can always deal with them there.”

“And make it look like an accident how?” I said. “As the good doctor here will tell you, humans can tell if a corpse has been drained of blood, and they tend to get rather suspicious these days.”

“We could just leave them be,” Aramis said.

Everybody stared. “Aramis,” Athos finally spoke, in a voice that was very soft and gentle. “Are you sure you are quite well?” He darted a quick side glance at Marion and myself. Ever since Aramis had convinced us to let Vangelis live, his reluctance to handle the hunter problem in the established fashion had been giving us cause to worry.

“I am quite well, count,” the vampyre ground out through clenched teeth. I could smell the bloodlust sleet off him – it made his behaviour even more incomprehensible. “As I think I’d explained, we cannot possibly kill them all. We must employ a different strategy.”

“While you try to come up with a strategy, doctor,” Marion said, “those men remain dangerous. You are not the only one whom they hunt; you are not the only one with a vote.”

Athos was still looking imploringly at Aramis. The demon hissed, stepped very close to his lover and gritted out without moving his lips: “I don’t like doing your father’s dirty work any longer, Athos.”

“Aramis!” Discord blanched. “Is that what you think this is?”

“Have you forgotten, Athos?” Aramis spoke with that terrible, icy cold of his. “Have you forgotten, last time on Olympus, when your father sent us out on a mission? He made you promise you would take up the sword in defence of ‘your kind’.”

“So?” Athos said in a weary tone of voice that told me that conversation was happening not for the first time. “‘Our kind’ in this case is also your kind, Aramis. We must protect our heritage.”

“Why?” Aramis said. “What do you care about the banished gods and exorcised demons? If they can’t take care of themselves, why should we protect them? Why should we protect the weak and dying? You have always fought at the side of the most powerful men who ruled the earth, and I,” he reached out and took Athos’ hand in his, “I have fought at the side of the most powerful god.”

“Is this really the time?” I said, tapping my foot. “Surely you can have this argument later in the privacy of your rooms, gentlemen.”

Aramis turned on me. “You are no longer the scion of a powerful dynasty, nymph,” he said. “Don’t you see? We don’t have anyone to protect but _ourselves_. We aren’t under any obligation to protect others, who are too weak and stupid to do it themselves.”

“Those men try to kill us,” Marion argued.

“Those men don’t know about us,” Aramis objected. “ _We_ are respectable human citizens. _We_ know how to survive. We shouldn’t be wasting our energies on a lost cause any longer. We left Paris to go after Biscarrat, remember?”

“And to get Marie to safety,” Marion interjected.

“Who claimed that she knew where Biscarrat was.” Aramis flashed his teeth at me in what was very decidedly not a smile. “He is the one who counts. Those other pantaloons,” he waved a hand dismissively, “they are not important.”

“Who was it who wanted to leave everything and dash back to Paris to take care of Alex not so long ago, chyortik?” Athos purred with a smile curling in the corners of his mouth.

Aramis’ face was completely white. “He _insulted_ me.”

I choked and masked my laughter with a cough, while Marion smirked openly. Reading the Porthling’s description of Aramis as old and decrepit, as toothless and gouty, had been hilarious. In the end, Discord had convinced the vampyre that a trip to Paris would be too excessive an extravagance for the purpose of delivering literary critique, and Aramis was prevailed on writing a letter to the author, which I believed to be very strongly worded. In any case, Alex had revised his vision of the good Bishop of Vannes in subsequent instalments, describing his step as firm, his skin as smooth and his teeth as brilliant and dazzling.

“Those men’s mere presence insults me,” Marion sneered.

“Then take care of them, Madame,” Aramis said with an ironic bow.

“This is what I intend to do, sir,” she faced him levelly. “With your assistance or without. If you and the good count prefer to continue your romantic trip down the canal, I’m sure Marie and I will find a way to lure those men out of hiding without you.”

Athos sighed. “Of course we’ll help. Aramis?”

The vampyre stepped back, and for a moment the shadows claimed him again. He bowed. “Of course. Whatever Madame wishes. Command me.”

A thrill ran down my spine at the sound of those words. “Bartleby,” I beckoned the leprechaun closer. “The address.”

He handed a piece of paper to Aramis, who unfolded, read it and passed it to Athos.

“Where do you need them?”

“Ponte Storto in Sestiere San Marco,” I said.

“They will be there,” Athos said. He handed Marion and myself in the gondola, and then put his hand on the small of Aramis’ back. “Come, doctor. One more time, for old times’ sake.”

Aramis’ black eyes gleamed in the twilight, and I could have sworn I saw his fangs flash as he turned to leave. Marion was watching him from beneath the brim of her hat.

“The good doctor is losing his touch,” she said.

“Don’t worry, my love,” I told her, reclining in the seat and fanning myself against the mosquitoes and the stench of stagnant canal waters. “He’s just being contrary. He’s never happy with what he has and believes that he can only ever find fulfilment in the exact opposite of what he has chosen. Let him dabble in pacifism a bit longer, like he dabbled in monastic life once upon a time. He’ll come round.”

“He seems happy enough to keep Discord permanently.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Discord is the only thing in his life that he never wished to give up.”

They were a good team, Discord and the vampyre. Later that night, after we had joined them in the count’s opera box, Aramis lounged in his seat with the air of a satisfied (and well-fed) man. Athos cast a solicitous look at me, but I merely smiled and brushed the feathers of my fan over my lips. There was no need to talk about what happened. The bodies of the men who had drowned most unfortunately and tragically in the canal under the Calle del Ponte Storto were proof enough that, however antiquated the strategy we deployed, it was still as successful as ever.

***

“I mean it, Athos,” I said when we returned to our own apartments and the door closed behind us. “We should reassess our strategy.”

“You enjoyed it,” Discord purred, watching me in the mirror as he untied his cravat. “You _love_ the hunt, Aramis.”

“I do.” There was nothing I could say. “But that is not all I love.”

“Oh?” Athos’ hands stilled on the buttons of his coat and he watched my reflexion as I approached him from behind and stopped within a breath’s width behind his back.

I snaked my arm around him and undid the rest of the buttons, all the way down, and his coat fell open to reveal the fine fabric of his shirt. In the mirror, I saw his eyes darken, and I peeled the coat off him and tossed it aside.

“This is beneath us, Athos,” I said. “Those men – they are nothing. Lowly mercenaries, plebeian brawlers who think they can become heroes if they fight monsters. Most of the time they can’t even tell who the ‘monsters’ are.”

“Those who have seen that portrait of yours can tell,” Athos said seriously. He grabbed my wrist and halted my hand at the waistband of his breeches.

“And how many, do you think, have seen it?” I sneered. “Biscarrat and his little gang, twenty men perhaps. Do you think that each of those ruffians travels to Paris to look at a portrait that is hidden away God knows where? They have no idea it exists, most likely.”

“That is still a huge risk, chyortik.”

“Is it?” I smiled and ground the heel of my hand against his crotch. “No, Athos. I have given it much thought. We are _good_ at passing as mortals, you know we are. You have survived for millennia. Marie and the Dame Blanche have been around even longer than you have, one way or another. And I, too, have learned to keep my head down and not attract any attention by trying to become the Pope, as you once told me I should, remember?”

“The portrait-” Athos began, but I slipped my hand into his breeches and the rest of his breath escaped in a gasp.

“The portrait is the only tangible piece of evidence they have,” I said into his ear. “We are putting ourselves much more at risk if we go after men who have no idea who we are and kill them. Think about it: _we_ go to _them_. What if there is a witness? What if somebody saw us in the neighbourhood of their house? What if somebody saw _how_ they drowned? These are much greater risk factors than a centuries-old portrait in a Parisian gallery.”

“You never worried about witnesses before, Aramis.”

“Humans are getting smarter. I told you decades ago that they know how to tell if a body has been drained of blood. The discolorations caused by the livor mortis tell them in which position a person had died and, consequently, if a body had been moved. If there’s something suspicious about the death, they send policemen to investigate. _I_ don’t want policemen to knock at my door and interrogate me after some thugs had been found floating in a canal.”

“Chyortik could always bedevil them,” Athos smiled and leaned back into my body.

For a moment, I flashed the wrinkled face and toothless grin of old baron von Stackelberg at my lover, and Athos grimaced and laughed. “Fie! Stop it, you fiend!”

I grinned. “Why bother?” I muttered, dragging my lips along the shell of his ear. “Why go to so much trouble if we could just do nothing?”

“This is a very underhand argumentation technique, Aramis.” He thrust his hips forward to push his cock into my grasp.

“I am devious,” I acknowledged.

“I never expected I would live to see the day when _you_ ’d dissuade _me_ from killing.”

“I never expected I would live to see the day when you’d insist on filthying your hands with the blood of the hoi-polloi,” I shot back.

“Ah!” Athos exclaimed, but I could not tell if it was in realisation or because I had tightened my grip around his cock. “So this is it, Aramis: their blood is not good enough for you.”

“It’s vile.” I shuddered and pressed my mouth to the throbbing vein at the side of his neck, breathing in the fragrance of his lifeforce through his skin. “Decidedly not palatable at all, my sweet idol.”

“You didn’t have to drink it,” Athos interjected. “That was entirely self-indulgent, it’s not like you killed them.”

“That’s how I know,” I parted my lips and licked along the distended vein, “that they are not worth it. They are not important, Athos, they’re vermin. Since when are we rat-catchers?”

His blood thudded, all but bursting through his skin, yet the valiant Discord still put up a fight.

“What about Vangelis, Aramis? You refused to kill him, too. Was he unimportant? Was he ‘vermin’?”

“We did better than kill Vangelis, Athos. We sent him away in disgrace. The mad old man, babbling about demons who haunt beautiful, nubile maidens at night. We destroyed his _reputation_ , which for a man like him counts for more than his life.”

Athos’ gaze locked with mine in the mirror, and his lips parted. “Do it,” he whispered, like he had done all those centuries ago, before we had sealed our covenant for all eternity.

My fangs pushed through the soft skin, and his cock jolted in my hand as blood began to pour into my mouth. My eyes closed of their own accord, while my mouth fastened around the fountain of life. His body grew heavy against mine, and without letting go of him, without unclasping my mouth and teeth from his neck, I sank down on a chair before the dressing table, pulling him down on my lap. Athos groaned, rolled his head back and ground his arse against my cock.

“All that talk about killing, Aramis,” he murmured in my ear, “it’s giving you quite an appetite.”

“Mmh…” My mouth was full of divine nectar, and my head spun with arousal as Athos rolled his hips in my lap. I released his neck long enough to tell him, “Take these off,” and watched him pull his breeches down his legs. His shirt had become unbuttoned, I didn’t even know when and how, as if it had a will of its own and was striving to crawl away to bare his body to my touch and gaze.

His cock was huge and damp in my grip, and I watched it in the mirror, sliding my hand up and down its length. He hissed when I let go of it, and I lifted my hand to his mouth, watched him lick across my palm, and wrapped my fingers around him again. Athos reached behind himself and unbuttoned my breeches with one hand. “Let’s go to bed, chyortik,” he muttered.

“No.” I released his neck and lapped across the vein, until it closed and healed. “Like this, Athos.”

“Aramis-”

I cupped his chin and locked my gaze with his in the mirror.

“Like this.”

His eyes widened, and I grazed the tips of my fangs along his shoulder, leaving a shallow welt behind that welled up with blood. “Lean forward.”

He obeyed, and I followed his motion and picked up a box of coconut paste. His head bowed between his shoulders, he clung to the dressing table with both hands, and his knuckles whitened. I pushed his shirt up his back, trailing the curve of his spine with my fingertips, and pressed heated kisses to his shoulderblades. “Keep still,” I muttered into his skin, which tautened under the caresses of my hands and lips. Stroking down to the swell of his arse, I left tiny scratch marks on the marble skin, and Athos’ back curved into a beautiful arch. My cock slipped into the cleft of his arse, rubbing up and down, and I scooped up some of the paste and smeared it over my hard flesh.

Athos groaned again, supporting himself with trembling arms, the muscles in his back quivering. He was beautiful, and ready for me, and I spread him open and shoved coconut paste into him with my thumb. It melted instantly, running down his balls, the insides of his thighs, into my lap, and I thrust my cock between his legs again, teasing him with it until he whimpered and pushed back into me.

“More?”

“ _Do it._ ”

I moaned and shoved my fingers into him, two at once, for he was open and begging, and he clenched the ring of muscles around my digits until it hurt. All-consuming heat and the throb of his heartbeat travelled up my hand, my arm, and rushed to my head and heart. When I moved my hand, he began to pant – harsh lungfuls of air that erupted from his mouth and made his ribcage shudder. I pushed in another finger, twisting my hand, spreading the slick grease all over his arse, where it mingled with the sweat that trickled down his back. He was so ready for me, so soft and open when I withdrew my hand, and the tip of my cock disappeared inside him at the merest pressure.

“Sit up, Athos.”

The panting stopped, and he became very still, but he didn’t stir.

“Sit up.” I trailed one hand up his back and threaded my fingers through his hair. “Or I will watch your asshole being slowly breached by my dick.” I jerked my hips and shoved myself in a fraction deeper, tearing a desperate moan from Athos. He pushed himself up and met my gaze with an air of defiance, flushed, his lips bitten, his pulse pounding at the base of his throat and his chest glistening with sweat.

“So beautiful,” I whispered, choking on the words, for my mouth had gone dry at the sight of Discord impaling himself on my cock. So rarely did he let me see this: his face, his eyes, clouded with arousal as he fucked himself on me. I leaned back, panting and lightheaded, as the weight of Athos’ body pressed down on me and my cock burned deep inside him.

“Touch,” I choked and swallowed, “touch yourself.”

Those beautiful, slender fingers curled around his cock; his thumb flicked over the tip, where moisture gathered, and then he raised his hand to his lips and licked it off. I moaned and clenched my teeth, willing my head to stop spinning, for heat was cascading down into my loins and my arousal spiralled fast.

“Athos,” I whispered his name again, and his lashes fluttered, his eyes closed momentarily, and then he opened them again and looked at me with eyes that kindled with divine hunger.

A ghost of the heathen smile flittered across his mouth. “Don’t hold back, Aramis,” he said and screwed himself deeply into my lap. I cried out, and liquid lust erupted in my groin. My climax surged at me like an avalanche, and my god rode me with short, harsh shoves of his hips, until light burst behind my eyelids and then velvety darkness enveloped me as he collapsed on top of me, his body pressed me into the chair and his scent clogged my senses.

“I love you, angel.” I came up for air, blinking my eyes open, and saw him kneel between my spread legs, his face burrowed in my chest. His arse was red and bruised, and my groin and hipbones smarted.

“Yes,” I replied and kissed him on the top of his head. “Me too.” I toyed with the dark, sweat-soaked curls. “I do love you, you know.”

“I know.”

“You will think about what I said?”

Athos laughed. “You wily demon!” He snorted, lifted his head and kissed me on the mouth. “Was this just a devious scheme to support your argument?” He gestured vaguely at our entwined bodies.

“No!” I slung my arms around him and pulled him closer. “Never! Athos, I would never-”

“Shh, it’s all right, chyortik. I know.”

“I just felt like it,” I added, cradling the dark head to my chest and pressing my mouth to his hair. “You were magnificent tonight. I couldn’t stop thinking about your mouth… your cock, so hard for me. I wanted to touch you.”

“Oh fuck,” he muttered, and his hot breath scorched my chest. “Let’s go to bed, Aramis.”


	2. The Sorrows of Satan

**Venice, February 1850**

Music and laughter streamed through the streets, along the canals of Venice like torrents of water rushing from the mountaintops of the valleys after the thaw. Masked faces everywhere, hearts throbbing in one rhythm as they teemed in the narrow alleys and spilled into the piazzas, boiling and seething and mating.

In the count’s spacious apartments (courtesy of Bartleby, who had invested a considerable sum of money into the Electric Telegraph Company which continued to grow apace), we were dancing. The liquid in my veins was like champagne, it sparkled and prickled under my skin, and I whirled around in my Venetian ball gown, my mask discarded, my hand enclosed in that of the vampyre, who smiled down at me with his black eyes. A respite from the hurly-burly of the streets, a short break from the Venetian carnival, which distorted time and pushed the world topsy-turvy, until even the most level-headed one of us felt like sliding over the planks of a ship that rolled on the ocean’s waves.

Marion was dancing with the count, her face aglow and her dress a storm cloud of silver grey. Aramis’ black eyes gleamed in the pale winter light. He twirled me around one more time, and we both waltzed to a halt by the piano, the keys of which danced under clever fingers. I was laughing, and so was Aramis, and for the first time since the 17th century I saw how young he was. Dr Szimara’s face had once again become that of the musketeer of yore, the pale smooth skin softly flushed, and a mouth that I wanted to kiss.

With my forearm against his chest, I rose on my tiptoes and pressed my lips to his. The soft exhale of laughter, like a warm breeze into my mouth, a caress that I’d known for oh so many centuries. He was beautiful, with his skin of alabaster and those black locks curled in elegant waves that framed his cheekbones and brow.

The piano tune changed, and the other instruments picked it up. A lively air, a common ditty, the Carnival of Venice, and I laughed again and nipped at Aramis’ lower lip. “O cara mia mamma!” I hummed, and, laughing himself, he joined in. “La bella gondoliera,” Aramis sang in that melodious voice of his and pressed my hand to his lips. “Bellissima sirena…” He had been honing his skills since he’d come to Venice and Athos’ love for music had erupted with a force that had surprised us all. I had heard Aramis sing before. He had taken great pleasure in singing all verses of _Laboissière, dis-moi_ to me centuries ago, and, as if he’d read my thoughts, he now picked up the lyrics and sang them to the tune of the popular canzonetta. “Suis-je pas bien en homme ? / Vous chevauchez, ma foi / Mieux que tant que nous sommes-”

“Je suis!” I trilled, and Aramis laughed again.

“Elle est, / Parmi les hallebardes, / Au régiment des gardes,”

“Co-omme un cadet!” We both concluded, and our voices rose entwined in a vibrato that was wasted on the folk tune and would not have been out of place on stage.

Athos and Marion danced past us, so close that I felt the ghostly kiss of her dress and the heat of his gaze on my skin. “Are you ready to throw yourselves back into the fray?” Marion called over Athos’ shoulder, and I picked up Aramis’ rakish tricorn and sat it on his head.

“Your hat it has three corners,” I sang.

“Three corners has my hat,” Aramis picked up the lyrics with much gusto and with great skill. “And had it not three corners, It would not be my hat!”

Oh yes, the demon had been taking lessons. That voice, so youthful and underpinned with the melancholy of his Wallachian homeland, had grown powerful. How many opera singers had woken faint and sore after a hag-ridden night, while their potency had been transferred to the bloodsucker? He had grown bored of hunting the hunters, for the blood of men-at-arms had grown insipid to him. They no longer dominated this new world in which we lived. The world had changed, and the vampyre had changed with it.

“My bat had left three mourners,” I sang in reply. “Three mourners left my bat. / Had he not left three mourners / He would not be my bat!”

“Impertinence!” the demon hissed, while the Carnival of Venice rose to a magnificent crescendo around us. His black eyes devoured me and made the champagne in my veins sizzle.

The door opened, and Grimley stepped in.

“A letter from Paris.” His gaze trailed over the demon, who leaned with one hip against the piano, over me adjusting my gloves, and to the couple who were still whirling round and round under the unlit chandelier. “M. le comte.”

Athos twirled Marion around and handed her to Aramis, who offered her his arm and a glass of wine, and took the sizable package from his valet’s hand. “That is all, Grimley.”

The Olympian bowed with exquisite insolence. “You do remember that M. Porthos left Paris, sir. To go gallivanting in the Mediterranean, as I understand.”

“Of course I do. Go now.” Athos began to unwrap the parcel. A while ago, Porthos had decided that the adventures of The Three of Them were no longer as riveting as they used to be and that nothing kept him in Paris any longer.

“Your parrot is supposed to be the hero, Athos, but I’ve grown tired of waiting for him to do something heroic. He tried to marry a child, but she didn’t want him and fell in love with the king instead - much more sensible, that’s what I say. It was sad for your parrot son though, never getting any. Even d’Artagnan had managed to seduce a girl or two, long before he had grown the fierce moustache that was the envy of us all.”

Before he set off on his journey, Porthos had left money and instructions with M. Maquet to keep the count regularly supplied with the latest copies of Le Siècle.

“Do you really want to read it now?” I grimaced. “The last parts were very grim and put you out of humour. I expect this one won’t be any more cheery. It’s not likely that he’ll bring you back from the dead.”

“Who knows,” Aramis pronounced gravely. “He loves you so much, count, he might find a way to immortalise you. Turn you into a saint, perchance.”

“Don’t blaspheme, flittermouse,” Discord said levelly, and the demon’s eyes flashed.

“It won’t take long. We can have luncheon and then go and join the frivolities.” Athos tossed the folds of the cloak of Discord back over his shoulder and sat down at the table, pushing his gilded bauta aside to make space for the magazines.

“Very well,” I agreed and seated myself likewise. “I am rather hungry. And I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to die, flittermouse.”

Before I knew how, he was behind my chair and, leaning down until the tips of his fangs brushed my exposed neck, he hummed, “Three mourners left the bat… How many mourners would cry over you, nymph?”

“You know how many,” I whispered, shivering. “You _saw_ them, Dr Szimara.”

Unperturbed by our exchange, Athos was leafing through the magazine, smirking as he did so.

“Don’t be such a tease, count,” Marion said. “If you have to read, read aloud.”

_“A murmur of admiration surrounded d'Artagnan like a caress. Everyone was eager to salute him. Dining with the king was an honour his majesty was not so prodigal of as Henry IV had been. The king passed a few steps in advance, and d'Artagnan found himself in the midst of a fresh group, among whom shone Colbert.”_

“Pah!” the vampyre muttered.

Athos’ smirk deepened, and he read on in his calm, vibrating voice: _”Good-day, Monsieur d’Artagnan,” said the minister, with marked affability. “Have you had a pleasant journey?”_

_“Yes, monsieur,” said d’Artagnan, bowing to the neck of his horse._

_”I heard the king invite you to his table for this evening,” continued the minister; “you will meet an old friend there.”_

_“An old friend of mine?” asked d’Artagnan, plunging painfully into the dark waves of the past, which had swallowed up for him so many friendships and so many hatreds.”_

“Ah, the plot thickens,” I said, looking up at Aramis, whose narrowed eyes and flaring nostrils gave an indication of how he interpreted Alex’ talk of ‘friendships’ and ‘hatreds’.

_“M. le Duc d’Alameda, who is arrived this morning from Spain.”_

“Oh!”

I startled. For once, Marion’s calm had melted away, and it was she who had uttered the exclamation.

_“The Duc d’Alameda?” said D'Artagnan, reflecting in vain._

_“Here!” cried an old man, white as snow, sitting bent in his carriage, which he caused to be thrown open to make room for the musketeer._

Athos’ voice trailed off. He was staring past me. I followed his gaze and recoiled in shock.

“Aramis,” Athos whispered hoarsely, and there was fear in his voice. “Aramis… What’s wrong?”

***

**Kisilova, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1725**

When Petar Blagojevich’s grave was opened and his body dug out to be inspected for the absence of decomposition, it was in the presence of the Kameralprovisor, who had arrived from town to write a report on behalf of the imperial authorities. Kisilova buzzed like a beehive that had spotted a battalion of wasps. There would be no sleep that night, or any other night, not until the wiedergänger’s heart was staked and his body burned.

The light of madness kindled in the villagers’ eyes, as the procession moved towards the graveyard, crosses and shovels held aloft. The Kameralprovisor cast sidelong glances at the tall man in a black cassock, as if he couldn’t believe that the cleric had accompanied him all the way from town. It was a stroke of luck that he had come, for the local priest was laid up with fever which had attacked him suddenly overnight and which he was not expected to survive.

The cleric was a stranger. His black eyes and hair made him look like one of them, but he had the bearing of a duke and the white skin of a cenobite who never strayed far from the cool shade of his cloister, and he spoke Hungarian with an unfamiliar accent. He spoke little and slowly, but he smiled frequently, showing his teeth, which were fine and of which, as the rest of his person, he appeared to take great care.

There were many fresh graves in the cemetery. The Turks had left barely five years ago, and where they walked, death marched by their side. But it was the spate of deaths that had followed the burial of Petar Blagojevich that set the fire ablaze in the villagers’ hearts and heads. The fire of fear, and the fire of righteousness, for he had been one of them, and he had become one of the others. Nine people had perished in eight days, succumbing to a sudden malady after being throttled at night by their neighbour who had returned from the grave. For this, he would burn.

The men with crosses made way, and the men with shovels stepped forward. Fresh earth was turned and heaped, the wood of the coffin, maggots crawling and spilling out when the lid was lifted, and then a cry. “Vrykolaka!” somebody gasped, and: “Upir! Upir!” shouted others.

A wooden stake wielded in a trembling hand, and then – a voice. The soft tones, the strange accent, the commanding air of a man accustomed to obedience. “Not yet!” The stranger pronounced, and everybody halted, staring at him with eyes mad with hunger and fear, bodies straining like those of dogs on a chain that had smelled a fox.

The priest pulled out a crucifix from his vestments and kissed it. He held his aspergillum aloft and blessed the dead-not dead body, which was fresh and plump, whose hair and beard had grown, and whose nails were as sharp as the talons of a carrion bird. Another gasp – for the priest had crouched down and then slithered into the open grave, where he perused the face of the upir at close quarters, shading his eyes from the sun. After a breathless minute, he straightened his back and rose, and the semi-circle of villagers pulled back with a groan.

The priest smiled. “It is well,” he said. “Do it.”

He turned to the Kameralprovisor next. “Make sure to put everything in your report,” he said softly. And then, with a movement so sudden that no eye had been able to follow it, he swung a stake that he had torn from a man’s hand and rammed it deep into Petar’s heart.

Fresh blood spouted forth, surging from mouth and ears, and the priest clutched the stake in a steady hand, holding it in place in a heart that was still throbbing.

When the bell ringers entered the church, they stopped dead in the narthex, at the foot of the stairs leading to the belfry. The priest stood at the altar, and light fell askance on his face. He lifted his head, and they saw he held a chalice in his hands. He beckoned them closer, and they obeyed, pulled towards the man of god by invisible strings. The altar candles flickered, and it seemed to them that the wax lights turned into tapers of a mortuary chapel.

The priest raised the chalice in both hands and spoke words that chilled the very marrow of their bones:

_Take this, all of you, and drink from it:_  
_for this is the chalice of my blood,_  
_the blood of the new and eternal covenant._  
_which will be poured out for you and for many_  
_for the forgiveness of sins._  
_Do this in memory of me._

He brought the chalice to his lips and drank. A groan, like the last sigh of a dying man, shuddered through the air, even though none of the men had opened their mouths, for they stood paralysed, deafened by the rush of their own blood in their ears.

The priest lowered his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a benevolent smile suffused his features, and he spoke in that soft voice of his: “I forgot, transubstantiation is a mystery to you, as you do not belong to the Catholic Church. Go, then. Go and do your duty.” He waved a white hand at them, releasing the invisible bounds that had tethered them to the spot. They fled, all the way up the bell tower, to fill the air with chimes while the body of their neighbour was being reduced to ash.

In the vestry, the Kameralprovisor was busy writing. He looked up when the priest entered. “Forgive me, Father,” he said, nervously. “This is most embarrassing, but I seem to have forgotten your name, and I will have to put it in my report-”

“No,” the priest said. “You won’t.”

“But-”

Another smile, more mild and benevolent than ever. “Kisilova has its own priest,” he said. “Put his name down. Let him have the honour of being the man who had rid his village of an unthinkable terror.”

“That would be most irregular.”

The smile morphed into that of a tiger-cat that the Kameralprovisor had once seen in the menagerie. “I _could_ tell you my name,” the Duke of Alameda said. “But what would be the use of that?”

I saw their eyes flicker, saw Marion and Marie whisper, saw Athos rise from his seat and come towards me. “What is it, Aramis?” he repeated in a much gentler tone. “What happened?”

“…the name he used after Athos died,” Marion was saying in a low voice. “When I met him-”

“How did Alex _know_?” Marie whispered back. 

Athos had taken my hand, and the touch of his warm skin jolted me back to my senses. “Aramis?” he said my name, my true name, the only name that meant anything. “Aramis.” His arms around me, and the hard planes of his body moulding themselves against me. “It’s all right. I’m here. What will you have me do? Tell me.”

***

**Mount Athos, 1065 AD**

Nikephoros Phokas had been called the White Death of the Saracens. He had the name of the Goddess of Victory inside his name, as I had once told him, he could become unstoppable. He did not need me anymore when I had left him, or so I thought, having bequeathed upon him all my - fairly extensive by that time - knowledge of military strategy.

Nikephoros, my dear friend, had lost the love of his life in his youth and had taken a vow of chastity. Fortunately, this vow did not extend to men. “You conquered all but a woman” the treasonous witch who murdered him had written upon his tomb. Nikephoros had deserved better; surely Stepmother had done me a favor when she had forced me to swear off women for good.

No, there would be no women on Mount Athos.

I had to leave Nikephoros when I heard that he had all but given away my mount to Abraham. Abraham of Trebizond, the loud-mouthed preacher who shouted and menaced in the name of the Nazarene all over Byzantium. Abraham who fled to Bithynia because of “moral laxity” of the monks in Constantinople. I had put my hand around his throat in a dark alley and quietened that loud-mouthed preacher for good. Abraham of Trebizond would shout no more.

I had taken the charter signed by Nikephoros. Emperor Nikephoros II. Under the name of Athanasios of Trebizond, I have taken charge of Mt. Athos. I knew what to say to my old friend the emperor to have him lavish my Mount with the dinars he captured in Aleppo. He would provide my endowment and build my Great Lavra. And then… to work! 

It was so _easy_ to introduce the typicon for cenobites, to outline my own preposterous rules. Why, no one had even blinked when I told them that I had a vision of the Virgin Mary, bless her and the fruit of her womb Jesus as well while I’m at it, and she had told me that since she had set foot on my Mount, no other woman shall ever set foot there again. And just to be sure I’ve covered any and all eventuality, not any kind of female animal or bird creature either (for I knew better than to trust my family). The milk and eggs could be imported from the mainland. 

I laughed in my Father’s face as I beheld Olympus, rising in the distance. “Listen, my brothers,” I dictated for the typicon, “bearing patiently year after year with other men is precious and indispensable.” They were young and doe-eyed and full of dreams of the baby Jesus. And I, as you all know, could tell them tales of first hand accounts. Not that I would, for I had better uses for their ears than filling them with Nazarene nonsense; they were much better utilized to hold onto while I fucked their eager throats.

Mount Olympus. Each morning I greeted the dawn and turned my face towards it. I would stretch, and inevitably hit a sleeping monk with one of my hands, and then another one with my foot. And before long, I would become the very embodiment of cenobitic monasticism, with all my brothers in communal harmony submitting to my rule. 

And when they called out God’s name in the throes of passion, it was not Zeus they invoked. 

Were they asleep then, the Dodekatheon on Olympus? I hoped not yet. I hoped they had been watching me: watching me build Christian Churches so close to their doorstep, and showing them day in and day out how very _seriously_ I took their curse.

I had it written somewhere in the annals that Athanasios the Athonite had died in a tragic accident in 1003 _Anno Domini Eorum_ , a very sad occasion upon which some rocks met with head. The truth is, half the men on Mount Athos had been hermits whose sanity was inversely proportionate to their holiness. As for the rest of my flock, I kept them so religiously plied with retsina that they would as soon call me my own son than breathe a word about any of my shenanigans to the outside world. 

They loved me, I think. I had been the manifestation of life eternal, and through me they too could find a piece of the promised land, or rather I through them. For almost a century I was thus occupied. The world without thought Mount Athos the last bastion of monastic austerity. But up above, they knew, they _knew_. The world had forgotten them, but no, not I. I would remember. 

Eris, with her black wings spread above her head. Ares, in his golden chariot. Apollo, and his rapacious pursuits. Hermes, and his winged caduceus. Athena, who disdained them all. Hera, and her words. Her _words_. 

_Watch me, my brothers and sisters. You who are yet clinging on to life eternal. You who did nothing to stop the onslaught of the era of the Nazarene._

The Athonite peninsula was mine. No woman would set foot on it, but no man either without my express permission. None of my acolytes knew why, but it had been my home, and I was safe there. 

But then, as it was inevitably bound to happen, I had a visitor. A shaggy, black dog, who wagged his tail at me and stuck his wet snout right in the space between my legs.

“He likes you, abbot,” one of my young cenobites said, unsuspectingly petting the sly stray. I pushed the dog’s face away and he gave a pitiful squeal and fixed me with a look of betrayal. “Perhaps he’s hungry,” the monkling suggested.

“Yes,” I rose, and pulled my robe tighter around me. “I’ll go find him something to eat.”

I walked out towards one of the hermit caves I had reserved for myself. As much as I had advocated “struggling among men,” I had need of solitude, and my hermitage had been mine alone. Until that day, no other man nor god had set foot there. I paused at the mouth of the cave and cast a look back upon the black dog, who stood there with bright, amber eyes and wagged his tail at me with an expression of sheer imbecility.

“Show yourself, Ares.”

My brother appeared before me, adorned in his usual garb, which is to say only his helmet and gorgeous Achaean nudity. His helmet too was all too soon shed and set aside and he stood before me as if he had been a mere man and I had been the god. My hand clenched along my long walking staff. One step, one swing, and over the cliffside he would go, to visit with Uncle Poseidon.

“What do you want, Ares?” I had spoken slowly.

“Our power weakens,” he said, “yet you amuse yourself with Christian fucktoys.” 

I cast a look towards Olympus. “It does not appear to be on fire.”

“I am one of the few lucky ones,” he resumed. “Do you think anyone bothers anymore to invoke Hestia? Or Demeter? Or even Apollo?” 

“I presume they backed a losing horse,” I snarled. “But you, well - good for you, Ares. As long as men live, there will always be War. And Discord.”

“It isn’t my name they call when they go to battle,” he scowled at me, baring his magnificent teeth that sat in his mouth almost like the snarl of the dog he so loved to embody.

“ _I_ call your name.”

“Aye, that you do. Or I should say, you _did_.” He took a step towards me and I backed up despite myself. “Do not be afraid of me, brother. My power too has weakened. You have seen to that, haven’t you? Living here in monastic retreat? Propitiating I know not whom - possibly Priapus - with your cock.”

I shrugged. “Times have changed, Ares. People have grown to appreciate a priapic cock more so than in our day.”

“You can’t abandon us, Athos.”

“Oh?” My heart beat wildly in his presence. My emotions spun out of control and I no longer trusted myself to decide what was right or wrong. 

“I need you, brother. We are all lost without you. You are the last fortress of our Pantheon. You can walk corporeal among men, while we are left to skulk in shadows.”

“So what then? You can only watch but not touch?”

“Our powers are much diminished,” he confessed. “See?” His hand reached out towards me and I let his fingers caress the muscles of my chest through the harsh fabric of my monastic robe. My heart beat a war staccato in reply, but the din of a thousand swords wasn’t as deafening as before.

“You can still touch _me_ then.”

“We are one flesh.”

“We are something,” I conceded.

“Do not abandon me,” the God of War pleaded in soft tones that bewildered and aroused me. “I need you, brother.”

“I don’t need you,” I replied, steeling my heart. After all, it was he who had taught me how. “In fact, I should never have tarried so long under your noses. I shall leave soon.”

“And go where?”

“North. Up the Euxenos Pontos? I don’t care. Away from here.”

“Do not go, Athos. You are the last scion of Olympus.”

“I’ll make war up there, if you like.”

“You should stay and make war right _here_.”

His dark, curly hair fell around his face blown by the wind, and for a moment I could actually see it - the family resemblance. Ares was right. We had been one flesh. I think I may have loved him once, before he taught me that love was a mistake, that it was nothing but a sea to drown in. That he who won in love only won death. Like Achilles. Like Alexander. Like Antinous. 

“I do not love you,” I said aloud. 

“Foolish demigod,” Ares whispered, his body pressed against me with a sudden burst of passion that appeared to set his eyes aflame. “You do not know how not to love.” His forearms pressed into the rock on either side of my head and my robe fell to the ground, commanded by a higher power. And then his lips were upon mine, urgent and full of a gentle heat that warmed me and spread throughout my limbs. “I have missed you,” he breathed into my mouth. “Have you not missed me?”

I groaned and pulled him inside my cave, where, contrary to my expectation, he had allowed me to throw him to the ground and then pulled me on top of him, our teeth and tongues colliding with each other in primal frenzy.

“Do you think I was so horrible to you?” Ares asked, eyes wide and burning with lust as he spread his body out underneath me, like some kind of an offering. 

“You were the only thing you could have been,” I replied.

“An answer worthy of our brother Apollo,” he snickered and let his hands caress the back of my neck, pulling me into another ravenous kiss. “So, take your revenge,” he pressed his words into the skin of my neck, where his tongue and teeth worried the overly sensitive flesh and I moaned helplessly even as I pressed him into the ground with my hips.

“I don’t want revenge,” I exhaled, grabbing his hair to hold him in place so that I could contradict my words and suck blossoming bruises into the skin of his neck. They would fade too soon. He was a god. Time meant nothing to him. 

“Then take _me_.”

I grabbed onto his thighs, splayed open around me, and I held them aloft to make my way into the core of him, the heat of him. I would not be gentle. If it was war he wanted, war I would make with him.

He groaned into my mouth, dirt and gravel dug into his flesh and so did I. My sweat dripped from my forehead and landed on the tip of his tongue.

“Do you absolve me, abbot?” he laughed as I thrust deeper into his yielding flesh. “What do you say, son of Eirene? Can we have peace now?”

I flipped him around, pushing him onto his knees, pulling his hair by the fistful as I drove back into his body. My body shuddered with spasms of pleasure. His back curved under me and his hips shoved back, meeting me thrust for thrust. Was this still the God of War underneath me? Where was his flaming flagrum and his golden chariot of yore? Was I all that was left of his power and his glory? Ares clenched tightly around my cock, obliterating my last thought and tearing my orgasm from my body like the vulture did Prometheus’ liver. 

I sank exhausted against his back. His knees buckled and he fell prone to the ground, pulling my arm around himself as if I was a blanket he wanted to burrow into. Such a simple gesture of intimacy utterly undid me, and I pressed my lips against his shouderblade, closing my eyes and trying to catch my breath.

Inside my arms, the sweat-soaked flesh disappeared, and was replaced by soft, shaggy fur, and then a wet snout poked into my neck. I laughed and allowed the dog to snuggle into my embrace. 

“I could sleep for another hundred years,” I muttered into the warm fur.

 _Granted_ , I heard. Or thought I heard. There was no telling of what happened.

When I awoke, it took me some time to get my bearings. I would no longer recognize Mount Athos, had it not been for the Great Lavra and Olympus laughing at me from where it rose and pierced the sky on the western horizon. 

I smiled to myself. “I don’t suppose you also put the Grigori to sleep for a hundred years, did you? No, that would make things too easy for me.” 

I sighed and walked down the meandering path towards the port. Beneath the bluffs, the blues of the Aegean reflected the rays of Helios back at me. Could I truly trade these azure waves of the Mediterranean for the untraversed depths of the Black Sea?

“Does Kyrios feel refreshed and ready to leave his brothel?”

I nearly threw my arms around the gnat.

“You! Ares preserved you for me!”

“It would appear so, Kyrios.”

“Let’s get the hell off this mountain,” I suggested, continuing towards the port.

“Where are we going, Kyrios?”

“No idea,” I shrugged. “Colchis? Varna? Odessa?”

“Will there be a lot of fucking and fighting, Kyrios?”

“You talk too much, you know that?”

“Certainly, Kyrios.” 

“What did I tell you about talking too much?”

“That you’ll cut my tongue out one day?”

“Just you wait,” I promised and cast one more look towards Olympus where the gods too slept, abandoned by all. “Sweet dreams, Father,” I smiled and scanned the port for the ship that would take me away from Mount Athos. Away from the waters of my birth.

***

**Paris, March 1850**

“How… how did you get in?” a flabbergasted Alex dropped the books he had been holding onto the parquet.

“I have a friend who is very good at climbing through windows and opening doors,” I replied, rising from my chair to walk over to his side.

“Would this good friend of yours happen to have a medical degree as well?”

“Alex!” I folded my arms over my chest and fixed the author with a disdainful look.

“Is he here, too?” Alex looked behind me and then behind himself. I could deduce by the twitching of his finger that he was quite itching to cross himself.

“Alex, what have you done?” I spoke, keeping my voice as even as I could. “What have I told you about being mindful what you write?”

“That… there will be… a reck-- a reckoning?” the writer stammered. Suddenly, he gathered himself up and faced me with fearless pride. “You sir, are not the boss of me!” he pronounced. “I write what the Muse tells me, not what may or may not please a fan, such as yourself. And that is, after all, all that you are, M. le comte!”

“A _fan_ ,” I ground my teeth in barely suppressed rage. “Would a mere _fan_ know that you utterly stole the French translation of _Hamlet_ that you published a few years ago? You even had the audacity to keep the altered ending!”

“So accuse me publically!” Alex sneered, puffing out his chest.

I squeezed my fists. Between my palm and fingers a jolt of electricity stung my flesh.

“That’s what I thought,” the daring Porthling continued. “Now, as I said, I write what I please, and what it pleases me to write is historical drama. I apologize if the ending of _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ wasn’t to your liking, sir, but that is neither here nor there. Maquet and I…”

“Maquet is gone,” I interrupted his self-satisfied tirade.

“Gone? What do you mean, pray tell?”

“A very good friend of mine paid him a visit last night. Maquet will collaborate with you no more.” A cruel smile distorted my lips. No, we could not kill Porthos’ son, no matter how high he reached in his hubris, but we could still _hurt_ him. 

“But I…”

“You overstepped, Alex.”

“But you…!”

I turned to go, picking up my gloves from his writing desk. “Time flies at such a rate, and it is very probable, Monsieur, that we shall never meet again. I wish you well.”

“What _are_ you?” he demanded in a furious fit.

Inside the grown man, the little petulant child still strove for answers. But he had already claimed enough of me for himself, had made too much from the inheritance I had unwittingly left him. It should have sufficed for one man’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the Porthling’s purse was as expansive as his quasi-Titanic soul. 

“Take care, Alexandre.”

Out in the street, a sudden gust of a spring storm twirled the tender, torn buds over my head. I pulled my top hat firmly over my ears and cast Alexandre Dumas’ window a parting look. He was there still, his hand pressed to his heaving chest, following me with dark eyes of desperation. It was a look I had seen too many times on the faces of others during my long existence. It was the look of a man whose heart had just been broken.


	3. Dead Souls

**Venice, May 1854**

The Teatro San Benedetto, unlike La Fenice a year ago, was in a state in furor, and the curtain had only gone down on the second act of _La Traviata_. I clenched my fists over the rails and blinked, expelling one treacherous tear out of my eye. It was Violetta’s desperate cry of “Amami, Alfredo, amami quanto io t’amo!” that completely undid me as she abandoned her lover in a moment of catastrophic self-sacrifice.

Last year, the audience had jeered, deeming the production ridiculous (it had to be set in the seventeenth century instead of modern times to appease the censors who had very little sense and even less appreciation of beauty) and deeming the soprano too whatever it was that humans most abhorred in themselves: too _old_. At thirty-eight, she was not deemed to be desirable enough to play the consumptive, young heroine, who captured the imagination of so many so quickly since her untimely demise. But the current soprano, the lovely Maria Spezia-Aldighieri, had pleased the eye as well as the ear and caused a veritable stampede.

“I still find it very amusing that they set it in Richelieu’s time,” Marion giggled, sliding her hand across Marie’s skirt. “Very à propos, don’t you think, darling?”

Marie, appearing less amused, looked at me with doe-like docility. “You were right to insist we give it another chance, count. I admit, your ear seems more attuned to this type of oeuvre than mine.”

“Oh no,” Marion pronounced, “it is hopeless. We’ve lost Discord.”

“What?” I unclenched my fingers around the railing. The beautiful notes of Verdi’s music still replayed themselves in my head. It was sublime, just as I remembered it.

“I am beginning to seriously contemplate eating Verdi,” Aramis sighed with a resigned air.

“Don’t you dare!” I shouted over the din of the ecstatic public.

Aramis rose gracefully from his seat and relocated closer to me so he could take my hand and ask if he should send Grimley for champagne. The lamps were lit for the intermission and I dared not kiss him, even in the semi-privacy of our box, but I traced my thumb along the veins of his hand.

“You must promise me never to make any stupid sacrifices for my sake,” I whispered into his ear.

“It is only a made up story, Athos, you know that better than anyone else.”

“Pragmatism? That is all you have to offer me?”

“Sometimes, it even works,” he grinned and pressed my hand.

By the close of the third act, my personal elation had reached a fevered pitch. I could not imagine being able to make it through the heart-breaking melody of the upcoming aria “Addio al passato” in the fourth act without embarrassing myself very publically.

“How is it that you are so much more popular as a courtesan than you were as a duchess?” Aramis jeered at Marie from his place at my side. “You have inspired men onto such greatness, the poor count here is about to melt in his seat.”

“I was just as inspirational as a duchess, thank you, Aramis!” Marie fanned herself with disdain. “If you recall, Donizetti’s opera _Maria di Rohan_ was written about that particular incarnation of me.”

“I love you, darling,” Marion smiled, “but that was an incredibly uninspired work of art. Don’t you agree, count?” 

“What?” My mind had once again replayed the last notes of the impassioned quartet.

“ _Maria di Rohan_?” a pair of lynx-eyes blinked at me and a little foot pressed up against my ankle.

“Utter shit,” I replied.

“See, darling?” Marion laughed and pressed a spontaneous kiss to Marie’s blushing cheek.

“You’re only saying that because you’re jealous, my dear Bertha!” the nymph smacked the fairy across the lap with her fan.

“Face it, darling,” Marion went on, “you were much better at the courtesaning than at being respectable. Truly, my love, we should never attempt to be respectable again!”

“The soprano is very effective,” Aramis’ breath brushed my ear. “Will you be alright, love? Or do I need to go down upon my knees like I did at Verdi’s premiere of _Rigoletto_?”

“I heard he lost both his children and his wife when she was still quite young,” Marie was saying with a faraway look on her face. “Perhaps it is all that pain that makes the man so gifted? His soul could be transported close to the angels.”

“It is the closest I’ve ever felt to the true presence of the divine,” I admitted quietly causing Aramis to take my face into his hands and look into my irises with the most astute look that Dr Szimara could muster.

“Athos,” he whispered against my cheekbone, “you _are_ the presence of the divine.”

“He transports me,” I replied, unconsciously echoing Marie’s word choice.

“I am going to murder--” I pressed our lips together before Aramis could complete his foolish threat. “You… later… with my cock.”

“Oh, get a grip, you two!” Marion’s little foot delivered a swift and well-aimed kick against my shin.

“Ow?”

I spent the entire fourth act in tears, ruining both mine and Aramis’ handkerchiefs. I could not tell where the pain of my emotional involvement ended and where the pleasure my eardrums were awash in began. I could no longer tell whether I wept for grief or joy at all, only that I never wanted it to end.

“I wish there was some way to capture that!” I exclaimed after the curtain fell. “Imagine what that would be like, Aramis, to be able to hear your favorite music whenever you wish.”

“I believe that humanity will be quite up to that task soon enough,” my beloved responded. “Capturing sound is the next logical step once they’ve managed to capture images.”

“Until such time, we shall just have to go to every opera ever composed by Signor Verdi,” Marie smiled, looking flushed and heated from whatever it was that Marion had been purring into her ear.

“That might be quite a bit of opera, at the rate he’s going,” Marion laughed.

“Perhaps he’ll die young, like Signor Bellini,” Aramis suggested with a look of innocence.

“Fie! You cannot mean that. I refuse to believe that this music leaves you unmoved, chyortik, you who have two souls instead of one, so should be moved doubly,” I wheedled him as we walked towards the main exit. “On top of your two adorable flittermouse ears,” I added, “so keen they are.”

“I may have the ears but not the heart for it,” Aramis shrugged.

“It must be due to the darkness of your Slavic soul,” I teased him. “Perhaps back in your native Carpathia lie the melodies to unlock the mysteries of your heart.”

“I’m happy to open them to you at any moment,” he spoke tenderly, his thumb brushing along my cheekbone, to chase away the puffy trails of my tears. “The mysteries of my heart, or any other body organ. Command me.”

“You…” I leaned forward, my hands wrapping around his waist despite my better judgement. But I completed neither my thoughts nor my intended action. Instead, I pulled him close and drew his face into the shadow provided by my body. “I don’t believe it.”

“Mmm?”

“Aramis, don’t move.”

His lips brushed against the ligaments of my neck and I could feel his nostrils flare. He could sense the danger from the very tension of my body.

“It’s Biscarrat.”

I pressed my arms tightly around my beloved as he attempted to tear himself from my embrace.

“Hush. Don’t be foolish, little nightwing.”

With my eyes, I quickly sought out the Grigori among the throng of departing theater goers. Prim and quiet like a shadow, Grimley appeared at my side. “Sir?”

“Follow that man. Don’t let him see you. Report back as soon as you can.”

“So much for the idea of spending the next few years blissfully floating from one opera to the next,” Marie sighed, leaning against the darkened wall at our side. Down on the dock, Bartleby had already hailed a gondola for our ladies.

“We can still easily do that if we kill him tonight,” Aramis turned, his fangs flashing in the moonlight.

I smiled and leaned into his body, drawn in by the kindling heat of his bloodlust. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Having aided Marie and Marion into their gondola, Aramis and I walked back over the dimly lit backstreets of Venice towards our apartments a stone’s throw away from Piazza San Marco. We did not speak, both surely lost in thoughts that anticipated our long-awaited vengeance. _Nemesis, walk with me,_ I thought, all other lofty emotions engendered by Giuseppe Verdi’s music trampled beneath this one thought. For too long has this man, this phantom, who dared to raise his hand and his pistol against my beloved’s breast evaded my clutches.

Time, which often flew past me in a blink of an eye, stood still and mocked me with the pitiful trudge of the clock’s lazy hands. The bells of St. Mark were silent. Aramis wrapped his arms around my waist and his head pressed against the back of my shoulder. His breath echoed with a powerful purr inside his chest, reverberating in the hollows of his ribcage.

“He will come,” Aramis said. “He is immortal now.”

“Grimley?”

“Are you not worried?” He turned me to face him, and I pressed our foreheads together, the strange coldness that overcame him at times like these was a soothing balm against my ragged nerves.

“I am impatient,” I admitted.

The slamming of the door below separated us and I reached for my sword while Aramis reached for his loaded pistols. In the doorway, Grimley - drenched to the bone and reeking of brackish canal water - bowed to us and collapsed onto the parquet.

“A thousand cunts!” I exclaimed, rushing to his side. “What has this villain done to you?”

“I am well, Kyrios, merely fatigued,” my guardian promised reaching his hand for the glass of wine Aramis had presciently poured for him and bringing it to his lips. “I followed the man, as you said, down to the harbor. He boarded a felucca there, _La Sirena_.”

“Headed where?”

“For Crete.”

“It has left port?”

“Indeed and most unfortunately.”

“Damn it!” I cursed.

“But why are you all… wet?” Aramis inquired.

“There wasn't sufficient time to warn you of his departure, so I stowed away on the ship,” Grimley continued with a complacent smirk. “I wanted to hear what his final destination would be, or anything else that we might find useful. Then I jumped overboard and swam back to shore.”

“Grimley, you are a gift.”

“Literally, Kyrios,” the smug bastard replied.

“Go on, gnat. What did you learn?”

“His eventual destination. It is a nest of vampyre hunters in the Aegean. Your enemy, sirs, was speaking of a vrykolakas infestation there. He had been sent for by an old friend to aid them in combatting this unholy menace.” Grimley’s eyes sparkled with diabolical glee. “Care to venture a guess who this old friend was, gentlemen?”

“Not Vangelis!” Aramis exclaimed.

“The very same, Master Aramis.”

“Uncanny,” my beloved shook his head. “I thought the old fart would have kicked it by now.”

“But, finally, Grimley!” my impatience grew. “Will you not tell us where he’s headed? What Aegean island?” Grimley swallowed and fixed me with a look of such tender concern that I nearly slapped him. “Grimley, now is not the time to lose your tongue!”

“Santorini, Kyrios,” he finally replied with a sigh.

 

***

**The Ionian Sea, May 1854**

Santorini. St. Irene’s island. Or Santa Eirene’s, to be precise. What kind of a cosmic joke had resulted in Thira being named that? They had called it Kallístē: the most beautiful. They had called it Strongýlē: the circular one. They had called it Thera. I had called it _home_. I had called it _motherland_. I had called it my mother’s land.

Aboard the clipper ship taking us from Bari to Corfu, I shut my eyes and listened the sound of the waves as they splashed against our hull. I was hoping that by cutting across Italy with the help of the newfangled steam engine technology, we could arrive at Santorini on Biscarrat’s heels. He had gone to Crete, that voyage would take him several more days, not to mention chartering a boat to take him the significant distance to Santorini. In the meantime, we had the Anemoi at our disposals, with whose help we could rely on meeting Porthos aboard some Octopus/Squid or some such in Corfu. It had been some time since we had all bathed in the blood of our common enemies together, and I had very little doubt my cousin would enjoy the exercise.

That problem resolved, I sank down beneath the main mast and shut my eyes.

_Ares, what the fuck?_

I could have been more eloquent, but the circumstances were dire, and I was about to lose the last reserves of what serenity I had accumulated during my brush with Buddha. My island, the most beautiful island in the Aegean, had not only become overrun by an incursion of what the Greeks called the vrykolakas, but more disgustingly - a haven for vampyre hunters! It had become a place that the unwashed masses took these alleged vrykolakades to be summarily executed by these butchers. The sacred soil of my homeland was bathed in the blood of Aramisian kind, whether or not he had recognized them as his kin. It was unlikely, to say the least, that my dear brother knew nothing about this.

_Do you remember who was depicted on Achilles’ shield, brother?_

_Quit playing games, Ares, you know damn well I can’t forget a single thing._

The five gods of war: Ares, Eris, Enyo, Phobos and Deimos. Not Adrestia, but then again, she was often conflated with Nemesis. Even back then, humans had a difficult time keeping up with my genealogy.

_I don’t believe you ever had the pleasure of meeting our younger sister Enyo. Although she was there with us, in Troy._

_The war goddess whose specialty is the sacking of cities?_ I laughed. _I’m not surprised to have missed her. She must have been busy collecting her rightful tribute._

_She was very cross with you when you killed Eris._

I imagined quite a bit of Olympus was. But I had quite forgotten Enyo. I had hoped that the world would have forgotten her as well. I had hoped she had dissipated into the fog long before Eris was forced into oblivion by the power of my mind.

_She is welcome to come discuss it with me, goddess to god._

_So you can kill her too?_

A soft chuckle washed over me on the breeze of an Anemos. I opened my eyes and saw Ares seated next to me. He wore a long, black cloak and a fisherman’s hat, but it had been him, the amber glow of his eyes was unmistakable.

“She came up with a much more elaborate plan to get her revenge, you see,” he spoke looking out upon the dark waves.

“What does this have to do with my home?”

“Enyo had travelled there, in the hope of tearing your mother from the realm of Hades. You did bury your mother on Thira, did you not?”

My jaw clenched and I sprang up to my feet, my palms bursting with coils of electricity.

“Hey now, calm down there, Thunderhands!”

“I will tear down your fucking mountain. I will tear open the gates of Tartarus. I will lead the Titans personally to your front door and I will laugh while you all die like the _dogs_ that you are!”

“I said calm the fuck down, Athos! It didn’t work!”

The thundercloud that had been slowly forming around my body halted and the sparks of electricity subsided.

“Persephone interfered,” Ares shrugged as if it was the simplest thing. “It isn’t so easy to tear a mortal from the Elysian veil, not even for a god!”

“So my mother’s spirit…”

“Is safe.”

I exhaled and collapsed onto the boards of the clipper again, the electricity discharging from my hands in the air around me. One day, I took a mental note, I should really learn to control that.

“But it’s nice to know where you stand on the subject,” Ares, too, exhaled a breath he had apparently been holding.

“You didn’t try to stop her?”

“I can’t be everywhere at once.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I want to anger you like that? War and Discord: we are one, brother. You and I have always been one even before you…” He stopped speaking and looking out upon the ocean again. “I never betrayed you, Athos, no matter what you might believe of me and my motives. And now I promise you that she will not be a threat to you again.”

“Fine,” I squeezed through my teeth, trying to relax my lips and my eyebrows from where they were forming a rather formidable Gordian knot. “Go on. What does this have to do with the vrykolakas?”

“Well, as such curses go, Enyo failed to raise your mother, but she succeeded to bringing half the island back from the dead. Or… partially back from the dead. The vrykolakades, those local revenants? They’re not exactly fully formed, you know. Not like your Aramis.”

“Don’t. Say. His name.”

“The deal you made with Father was don’t touch and don’t look,” Ares laughed. “There was nothing in there about not taking your beloved’s name in vain!”

“I will fucking end you,” I said, my blood draining from all my extremities again.

“I answered your questions,” he spoke calmly, raising his hands up so that his cloak fell open and I could once again see his body, gloriously undefended and still as beautiful as ever, “and now I think I will be going. But if you decide you need my help taking care of the hunters, you’ll know how to summon me.”

“I’ll kill those fucking bastards without your help!” I snapped into the gust of wind. My divine brother had vanished.

I grabbed the railing and emptied the contents of my stomach over the side. The mere idea that Enyo might have succeeded in tearing my mother from Elysium so she could torture her to get back at me, filled me with bile and gut-churning rage.

A soft touch upon my lower back. “Don’t!” I spun around and came face to face with Aramis.

“It’s just me,” he said and I threw myself into his arms where I shook like a leaf until he was finally able to bring me back to my senses with soft words and gentle caresses. “Hush now. I'm here. You’re safe, my love.”

“Take me below.”

 

***

**The Aegean Sea, May 1854**

We had finished tacking, and the cliffs of Santorini became visible through my scope. I had left Takoyaki on the bridge, and returned to my cabin, where I could at last finish my conversation with Athos and Aramis.

“Where were we?” I began. “Ah yes. That’s the height of fucked up, Athos!”

“You know, just when I think I’ve seen it all,” my cousin shook his head and reached to refill his cup with wine. He then offered to pass the bottle to Aramis, who declined the offer with the movement of one eyebrow, but otherwise remained immobile, like a statue. “I have half a mind to sail past Santorini, and keep going till we get to Litochoro.”

“Aye,” I laughed, “if you kill Enyo, mayhaps Aramis will be forced to pick up _her_ mantle!” Aramis scowled at me from his seat. “What? Not your fashion sense?”

“We have spent the last… I don’t know how many years failing at tracking down this hunter menace,” Aramis replied in aggravated tones. “Who, if I may remind you both, shot me in the heart and had his men lure me into a bear trap. Now, by some stroke of luck or providence, we have picked up his trail again. I will not abandon it so that Athos can go play out yet another familial drama on Olympus, in which he will once again forbid me to participate!”

“What if all three of us go?”

“Porthos, not helping!” Athos sighed.

“I am sorry,” I attempted to placate. “It is just that… well, your sister is a bitch. Both of them. Er… all of them?”

“Not all of them,” Athos shook his head and Aramis glared at him. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Athos suddenly bristled at his beloved, “at least I recognize my family when I see them!” Aramis blanched and froze. “I’m sorry, sweetling, I’m… I’m not at my best right now.” My cousin’s hand reached for the revenant, but he moved away, neither wishing to be touched nor cajoled.

“Right,” I decided to redirect. “So what’s our plan?”

The mention of a plan seemed to bring Aramis some iota of joy and his eyes shimmered with a sinister glow.

“What is the saying the sailors were telling us about? Taking the vrykolakas to Santorini?”

“It’s an expression of futility,” Athos said, “Like selling tea to China.”

“No, no, I get that,” Aramis got up and began to pace the length of my cabin. “But it happens, doesn’t it? The hoi-polloi, Athos, they really bring… something or someone… to Santorini so that the so-called experts there can deal with them. So that Vangelis can deal with them!”

“What are you suggesting?” Athos’ face formed a criss-cross of worry lines.

“Right now, all we have is rumors to go on. We must investigate the situation up close. If Biscarrat is there - he will know my face. So much the better!”

“Aramis, you’re scaring me.”

“I don’t follow,” I admitted.

The vampyre went on, “You and Porthos, tie me up, and take me to Vangelis!”

“You mean… tell Vangelis you’re a... vrykolakas?” Athos grimaced with evident distaste.

“He’s never seen my real face, only Stackelberg’s. And he’s never seen Porthos,” Aramis explained. I nodded, still confused.

“He’s seen _my_ face, Aramis!”

“He saw the comte de Perregaux’s face,” Aramis smiled. “The comte de Perregaux was a nobleman and a dandy. He will not recognize you if you wore a fisherman’s hat and garb.”

“Ah!” I concurred.

“And if you speak Greek to him,” Aramis added.

“Aha!” I concluded.

“Well,” Athos shrugged. “It worked for d’Artagnan in England.”

“It worked for d’Artagnan in England so well,” Aramis went on, “that his own disguise caused him not to recognize _you_ even though you were entirely undisguised.”

“Hats do that,” I added and scratched my beard with the knowledge of a connoisseur.

“But what if, once they believe us, they try to actually stake you or cut off your head?” Athos asked, rising in his own turn and stopping Aramis mid-pace.

“Well, you’re not going to let that happen, are you?” Aramis said, bewildered.

“Of course not,” Athos replied.

“Well, then it’s settled!”

“This solves nothing except an excuse to get us inside their compound,” Athos pointed out.

“That’s all we need. Or are you no longer the God of Discord?” Aramis sneered. “And are you no longer the son of Helios?” he veered towards me. I straightened to my full height while Athos’ mantle shimmered for a moment around him and slithered away as if chased off by its owner. “Once we’re inside, spare no one. But leave Vangelis to me.” An ugly smile curled in the corner of his mouth. “I have plans for the old man.”

“And I get Biscarrat,” Athos growled.

“And I get everyone else. Huzzah!” I pumped my fist in the air and grinned in anticipation.

 

***

**Santorini, May 1854**

“But why do you think he’s a vrykolakas?” Dr. Vangelis pressed his monocle deeply into the orb of his eye and examined Aramis up close, while I bit my lips and pulled my hat lower over my brow.

“Well, Father,” Porthos rejoined seeing that I was about to start laughing rather than reply, “it’s like this. He tried to bite me! Plus, look at how pale he is!”

“That he is,” Vangelis nodded and went to grab something from his chest. I glanced over at Aramis who barely shook his head in admonition at me.

“A friend of a friend said he had seen him dead and buried just a fortnight ago, and here he is now, walking and talking,” I finally joined in the fray. “And… he hates sunlight!” I added, remembering that this was a thing that at least some of what Aramis had called upior-kind were known to dread.

At this declaration, Vangelis sprayed Aramis with something from a flagon he had been holding. I twitched about to punch him in his impertinent jaw, but Aramis had discreetly stepped on my foot, and I reined in my fist.

“No obvious response to holy water,” Vangelis declared.

Softly, Aramis snarled into his gag.

“Why don’t you check his teeth, Father?” Porthos suggested, grinning ear to ear.

“That is the last test, when I have exhausted all the others, for safety,” the estimable hunter replied and produced a wreath of garlic, which he then dangled in front of Aramis’ face. My beloved’s nose wrinkled adorably, but otherwise, he remained unimpressed. “Now, have you seen him walking on holy ground?”

“Not personally,” I reflected.

“Not lately,” Porthos added.

The good doctor produced a crucifix from his box of hunter paraphernalia and pressed it against Aramis’ forehead. Aramis rolled his eyes upwards towards the wooded cross and stared at it intently, while otherwise not showing any adverse reaction to the unwelcome contact.

“All right, ungag him,” Vangelis waved his hand. It was evident he had about as much belief in Aramis’ vampyric abilities as he would in me had I declared myself to be the son of Zeus in that very moment. “My son, do forgive me this final invasion, but if you could let me take a peek inside your mouth?”

“Not at all, doctor,” Aramis mewled in his most dulcet tones. “I’m happy to oblige both your kind self and my confused companions.” He opened his mouth obediently and the good doctor stuck his finger in there and felt around for his fangs, which he would certainly not find unless Aramis wanted him to.

Porthos and I stared at each other with bated breath. At any moment, we expected Vangelis to cry out and flail about the room whilst blood spurted out of his severed fingers. Instead, he pulled away quite safely and declared, “My good friends, it is my expert opinion that this man is not a vampyre.”

“But could he still be a vrykolakas?” Porthos insisted. “I hear they walk in daylight, you know! And mock people on their way to church!”

“No, no, my young friend,” Vangelis looked upon us with the hauteur of a man about to start explicating, a look that I recognized only too well and missed not at all. “It is true that some vrykolakades can walk in daylight, but most still prefer the midnight hour, you see? But there is no sign of decay upon your friend at all. He seems gentle and mild and not averse to garlic nor the implements of the church. A true vrykolakas is insatiable, he feeds and feeds, until his demonic thirst is satisfied, and then, when he can find no more victims in his vicinity, he slowly climbs to the top of the belfry, and there he rings the church bells, and he rings and he rings, until that mournful peal drowns out all life within its scope of hearing.”

“That’s quite a story, doctor,” I could not help myself.

“Ah, but most importantly, my friend? They are not seen up and out of their graves on a Saturday!” With this, he pointed his finger upwards, as if the Lord his God was personally to witness his moment of great genius. “And what is today? That’s right - a Saturday. Now, worry no more, my friends, and cut him loose.”

“You’re absolutely certain?” I pressed again. “I would hate to be responsible for cutting loose a creature of darkness within the walls of your compound having brought him here myself.”

“My son, I have never been more certain of anything in my life,” Vangelis nodded and removed his monocle, signaling the end of his thorough inquisition.

“Well, all right then. If you’re certain.” Porthos and I exchanged a shrug and he cut loose the ropes the bound Aramis’ wrists.

“Thank you,” Aramis smiled at the leader of the vampyre hunters and rubbed his pinked wrists. “You see, Athos, I told you I wasn’t a vrykolakas.”

“What did you call him?” Vangelis’ ears perked up. At that moment, the doors behind us opened and shut, and we heard the hastening step of a new arrival.

“Doctor, I came here as soon as I could.” I had recognized Biscarrat and a cruel smile spread across my features. Next to me, Aramis’ fangs dropped. “If there is any way I can be of assistance, I am at your service, for as you know…” he stopped, spotting us.

“These men were just leaving,” Vangelis waved at us, with his back still turned, whilst Biscarrat blanched and trembled.

“The Duke of Alameda!”

“In the flesh,” Aramis made a graceful bow.

The next few moments occurred in chaotic simultaneum. Biscarrat went for his pistol, Vangelis lunged for his box of goodies, while Porthos threw himself at the door, barring it from the inside. In one leap, Aramis had swept Vangelis from his feet and laid him out upon his cot in a frozen stupor, while I stepped in between the barrel of Biscarrat’s gun and my beloved’s body. The bullet bounced off my armor, which blazed around me in all the glory made even more possible by the fact that my feet had been touching my native soil. It was unfortunate that mortals could not see it.

“You’ve had a good run, M. Biscarrat,” I grinned at my opponent, drawing my sword from behind my back where it lay hidden under my cloak. “But I’m here to see it end bloody.”

Biscarrat discarded his discharged pistol and also drew out his sword. “If we are to fight like men, then tell me who you are!”

“You want to know my name?” I asked, as our swords clashed, raining sparks all around us. “My name is the comte de Perregaux, but that might mean nothing to you. I was once called the comte de La Fère, perhaps you’ve heard of that name. But before that, before any of that, my name was Athos.”

“That is the name of a mountain!”

“It is a name of a _god_!” With these words, I sliced off his right hand. His sword, still clenched in discarded fingers, tumbled to the ground. “A god whom you angered,” I hovered over him, my body encased in a gathering thundercloud.

“Mercy…” the man shivered and bled at my feet. “I beg you…”

“Mercy, you beg?” my blade pressed against his windpipe. “You had no mercy for _him_ when you shot him through the heart!”

“But if you’re a god,” Biscarrat muttered, turning ashen from blood loss, “then what is the nosferatu to you?”

“He is _everything_ to me,” I replied and took his head off with a single clean stroke.

Our enemy lay dead at my feet and I turned to Aramis and Porthos, silently asking what next.

“I’ll come back for the good doctor,” Aramis replied. “Let’s get the rest of them.”

“Unbolt the door, Porthos,” I ordered, tuning in to the sound of the men trying to force their way in to come to the aid of those who had been trapped with us inside. It was too late. Porthos had already taken care of Vangelis’ apprentices, and Biscarrat had met the fate he had dreamed of for Aramis for most of his life. As for the good doctor himself, he appeared in a trance, immobile where Aramis had placed him.

Aramis laughed, his fangs razor sharp in his gaping mouth, and he tore Biscarrat’s sword from the cold grip of his disembodied hand. The door burst open, aided by the removal of the bolt, and the unwashed hunter masses lunged into the room, like lambs to the slaughter. Porthos picked two of them up and smashed their skulls together, dispatching them with no more effort than swatting a fly, while Aramis and I engaged the others who were coming for us. I kept my body in between him and the occasional silver bullet that came my way, maneuvering easily, finding myself exceedingly unimpressed with their skill. The ground was soaked with blood at our feet and I raised my eyes to heavens and cried out a paean that had not been heard in these parts in thousands of years.

My mother’s home would soon be purified.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something moving underneath one of the benches and I dove after it, pulling the small thing out as it screamed and cried while struggling abortively.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked no one in particular, for the creature in my clutches could not be expected to make a lot of sense.

“For fuck’s sakes, kill him, Athos!” Aramis lifted his teeth from someone’s neck long enough to bark out that command.

“He’s just a child, Aramis!”

“Have you learned nothing from the Mordaunt incident? Always kill the child!”

Those words had been spoken in French, but the small Greekling may as well have understood them for he wiggled in my grasp and cried even harder.

“Calm down, I won’t hurt you,” I whispered to him in his native tongue. I picked the child up and carried him through the broken door of the compound. All over the courtyard, the bodies of Vangelis’ men lay scattered in various stages of disembowelment.

The sun had long set over the caldera, and a bright moon shone her light over the waters. Even in the dark, Oia was still beautiful. The scattered white houses and the dark blue domes of the rooftops, like tiny churches sprouted over the cliffs. I walked down the path, holding the crying child to me until I could no longer hear the screams of the dying at the compound and then I set him down onto the dirt path.

“Don’t look back,” I said and watched his bare feet streaking in the moonlight as he ran away.

For a few moments, I was overwhelmed by how familiar it still smelled. The sea, the volcanic rocks, the soil beneath my feet. As if in one moment I had erased three millennia of my existence. I sank to my knees and let my hands feel the ground until the earth sang to me.

Or was it just the pealing of the bells that I heard? I got back up to my feet and rushed towards Vangelis’ compound. It was the church that stood nearby whose bells were tolling. I looked up at the white belfry, piercing the night sky, and I saw him, Aramis, brilliant teeth gleaming in his gaping mouth, a mouth that laughed and laughed as he rang the bells that announced the victory of death.

 

***

“You are coming for me. I know that and I am prepared.” The words greeted me on my return to the room where I had left the vampyre hunter in a state of shock. The great man had rallied, and he stood very erect, for such an old man, holding a cross aloft with outstretched arms.

I bowed humbly at the sight of so much dignified majesty. “May I come in, Dr Vangelis?”

He hesitated. “What if I said no?”

I smiled. “What do you think?”

His shoulders sagged, but he raised his chin in defiance, even as he took a step back and admitted me to his room. He still held the crucifix in front of himself, and I inclined my head and made the sign of the cross. A startled gasp tore from his throat. I looked up at him, smiling. “I was a bishop once,” I told him and watched him blanch and stagger. “Come with me now, doctor.” I stretched out my hand, and his horrified gaze fell on my blood-stained fingers and cuffs. “I know,” I sighed. “Another shirt ruined. No amount of washing and bleaching will restore it to its pristine state. And I daresay that you don’t have an adequate tailor on this godforsaken island.”

Downstairs, a scornful snort.

“Forgive me,” I added quickly. “I spoke in haste. This island is not godforsaken at all. In fact, quite the reverse.”

Behind me, Athos had climbed the stairs. His armour shone with the light of a thousand stars, and thunderbolts sparked from his eyes and fingers. This, _this_ was divine majesty, and it made me want to fall to my knees and worship him with all my fervour.

Instead, I turned to Vangelis. “Come on.” I stretched out my hand past the crucifix and pushed it aside. “Come with us.”

His skin turned the colour of faded parchment. “Where to?” he whispered.

I smiled. “To the graveyard, doctor.”

“Is that really wise, Aramis?” Athos spoke in a quiet voice that nevertheless carried the roll of thunder.

“Trust me.” I looked my lover in the eyes and saw the fires of Olympus gleam in their liquid depths. “We can’t leave it like that, you said so yourself.”

A sudden crash: Vangelis had dropped to the ground, like a man struck down by the hand of god.

I frowned. “Did you smite him?”

Discord shrugged. “Not me.”

“Cheer up, friends!” Porthos’ voice boomed in the darkness of the staircase, and a moment later the son of Helios stepped over the threshold, filling the door with his massive frame. “It’s not all over yet. The undead abominations are still in need of some good kicking – present company excepted.”

“I believe we have just lost a valuable assistant,” Discord sneered.

“He’s alive,” I said. “His heart is beating.”

“Porthos,” Athos told our Herculean comrade. “You carry him.”

Grinning, the rakish Titan picked up the floppy form of the valiant vampyre hunter, threw him over his shoulder and, whistling a merry shanty, thundered back downstairs. I fetched the leather case that held the doctor’s paraphernalia, and Athos watched me with serious eyes. He stopped me with a hand to my chest as I made for the door. “Aramis,” he said in a low, earnest voice. “Are you _sure_?”

My blood heaved and my loins burned. “Athos,” I breathed, my lips close to his, and the heat of his palm scorching my very heart. “Let’s do it.”

Outside the window, a cock crowed.

“Are you telling me they return to their graves every morning?” Porthos wrinkled his nose in disdain. “What kind of life is _that_?”

“A half-life!” A weak voice croaked from the depth of the cart that carried us towards the graveyard. Grimley was driving, and I was more than certain that he had made sure to procure the slowest, most stubborn donkey on all of Thira. I ground my teeth. The graveyard was only a few minutes’ walk away, but we weren’t going empty-handed, and nobody could be sure what we would be bringing back with us.

“Cursed half-life of the Un-Dead,” the croaky voice continued, for despite the unholy terror that filled his heart, the intrepid fiend could not stop himself from lecturing us on the subject. “They cannot walk in the light of day, the light that is sent to us by God-”

“Yes, Da’ is doing a good job,” Porthos agreed amicably. “He makes his light extra shiny when he knows I’m here.”

True to his nature, Vangelis rambled on. “The light that burns and hurts them, it drives them back into the accursed darkness of the dank holes, the dwelling places of the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead-”

“Shall I whack him over the head, doctor?” A low, impassive voice from behind Vangelis, and the face of Bartleby popped up, a ray of light catching in the glasses of his spectacles and another one in the blade of the raised shovel.

“Better not. We need him.”

“How can they return to their graves if they can’t walk on holy ground?” Porthos wondered aloud, and Athos rammed his elbow in his ribs.

“Shut up, you fool!” Athos hissed. “Or do you want him to drone on about it until our brains dribble out of our ears?”

“It is one of the unexplained mysteries,” I sighed, raising my eyes to heavens, where the bright red of Aurora’s blush was fading into the deep blue of the Aegean sea and sky.

“You want me to do what?” Vangelis stood by a new grave, supporting himself on a shovel, for his knees were trembling so much that he was in danger of falling to the ground again.

“Destroy the vrykolakades,” I told him smiling. “This is what you want, is it not?”

“You can’t-” he swallowed and croaked, “this is not-”

“Don’t worry, doctor,” I assured him, smiling still. “We will help. Porthos here,” I pointed to the Titan, who grinned and waved happily, “will open the graves for you, and I will speak a prayer to ease their passage to the afterlife. I was a bishop once,” I reiterated.

“You’re selling yourself short, Aramis,” Discord said. “Don’t be so modest. You were climbing the ladder to the Holy See.”

“Yes, that I was,” I sighed, for the memory was a melancholy one.

Athos stepped to me and pressed his lips to my ear. “The General of the Jesuits,” he whispered. “I was very proud of my chyortik.”

“Bartleby and I will look for fresh graves, Kyrios,” Grimley’s prim voice cut like steel through the air.

“Yes. Yes, you do that, Grimley,” Athos waved a hand without looking at him, and trailed his mouth along the ridge of my jaw.

“Do you want me to open it now?” Porthos asked.

“Yes, please.” Athos’ hot breath alighted on the corner of my mouth, and I closed my eyes momentarily, savouring the sensation of being scalded by divine flames. When I opened them again, I saw Vangelis stare at us in mute horror.

I turned my head and parted my lips, and Athos’ tongue slid slickly into my mouth, dragged over the row of my teeth, licked along my tongue. Lust churned inside me, mingling with the thirst for blood that was still unquenched. I let my fangs drop and drilled a tip delicately into Athos’ lips, sucking at the tiny wound to sample the taste of _ichor pure_.

“There he is!” Porthos’ voice drove us apart. My lips tingling from the kiss, I caught Vangelis’ eye and smiled at him.

“Look, doctor,” I said, pointing down. “There he is, your vrykolakas. I shall speak a prayer for his soul now, and then you will cut off his head and stake his heart.”

“He is not one of the Un-Dead,” Vangelis whispered with white lips. His gaze flickered to something behind me: a group of villagers had followed us to the graveyard, I had heard their hesitant footsteps on the rocky ground.

“How do you know, doctor?” I asked. “How can you be sure? Have you forgotten your _incompetence_? It cost many men their lives last night – do you truly want to risk that again?”

“This one,” Vangelis said, pointing a trembling hand at the body. “He was a good man. A husband and father.”

“So was Porthos,” I told him.

“Ho ho ho!” Porthos laughed. “Many times over!”

“Would you say he is a good man?”

“I-” Vangelis stammered. “He-”

Laughing still, Porthos tossed the coffin lid that he’d been dangling in one enormous hand aside. “Come here, you!” he boomed, patting his thigh. “Come and do your job. Ah, but first – the Bishop Aramis!”

As I knelt by the grave and poured holy water on the corpse, Athos moved. He walked towards the villagers, who skulked by the fence like belligerent sheep. A dancing Anemos twirled around and carried the words spoken in Athos’ reverberating voice to my ears.

“…You know about the vrykolakades and what they have been doing to your island,” Athos was saying. “Last night, they attacked the house where Dr Vangelis lives and where he works tirelessly to protect you from the undead menace!”

A mumble, a grumble, the first roll of thunder in the distance, and one of the villagers spoke: “That’s not a vrykolakas. That’s my mother’s brother.”

“Every vrykolakas is somebody’s brother or sister, or son or daughter!” Discord pronounced, throwing his head back proudly, forcing the plebs to squint and bow their heads at the sight of Divinity. “Do you believe that stops them from coming to your beds at night to choke you and to feed on your blood? How many of you have lost fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, to the hunger of the vrykolakades? If you don’t believe me,” Discord squared his shoulders even more magnificently and stretched out his arm towards the compound whence we had come. “Go and look for yourselves! Look at the carnage. Look at the men with their throats ripped open and their blood drained. Who do you think did that if not vrykolakades? You all heard the bells last night, rung by the undead to mark their triumph. Do you truly want to risk having them crawl out of their graves to come after your families at night?”

Discord let the question ring through the air. He then turned to us and pointed. “You all know Dr Vangelis!” he said. “Ask him. Ask him about the vrykolakades, and he will tell you that they have to be destroyed _now_.”

“Dr Vangelis,” I touched his arm gently and put a wooden stake in his hand. “Do your duty.”

For a moment, his eyes flashed and I knew that he was about to ram the piece of wood in my own heart. But I held his wrist in my hand, and he paled as pain shot through the brittle bones of his arm.

“Do your duty, Dr Vangelis,” I told him softly, and then I smiled at him with all my teeth.

A communal groan tore from the peasants’ throats. Above the open grave, Vangelis crouched like a supplicant, his bony hands clenched around the stake that stuck in the heart of the dead man. I knelt down beside him and yanked the wood out of the corpse’s chest. “You have to cut his head off, too,” I reminded him, and Bartleby materialised by my side and handed me an axe. “So that people can burn it and watch their nightmares go up in smoke.”

“They will never agree to do that.”

“Oh, I believe you are underestimating our combined powers of persuasion, doctor.” I handed him the axe and closed his trembling fingers around the handle. “I heard you explain why this method is necessary when dealing with the undead many times. You will explain it to them, and we will back you up.”

“Next one is ready!” Porthos called across the graveyard. He was twirling a cross that he had torn from the tombstone in his hand, while Bartleby shovelled earth aside.

I raised my hand in a gesture of blessing and pulled out a cross from under my vestments that I kissed with much reverence. “ _Cut his head off, doctor._ ”

Sweat was dripping from Vangelis’ brow, and the palms of his hands were rubbed raw. The scent of his blood wafted over to me, and I parted my lips and tasted it on my tongue. Once upon a time, he had been a powerful man, a man of impeccable reputation and standing in society. His body was crumbling to dust even as I watched, and the potency of his blood waned, like that of adulterated wine. That brain of his, which had come up with so many ingenious theories and methods of destruction, withered in his skull as his hands clasped the stake and the axe in turn, driving wood and steel into flesh and bone. As the bodies of vrykolakades were fresh and plump, Grimley pointed out graves to us of people who had not long been buried, for we had no interest in rotting corpses or skeletons.

By the time we had reached the third grave, Vangelis had emptied his stomach twice. By the time we had reached the fourth grave, the grumblings in the peasant herd have become louder, but Athos wrapped himself in divine glory and quenched the budding revolt. It would return later, but by that time we would long be gone.

By the last grave, Vangelis dropped to his hands and knees. “This is my granddaughter,” he rasped. “Not her… not her!”

I knelt beside him and put a gentle hand on the nape of his neck, letting him feel its weight and coiled strength. “She is a vrykolakas,” I explained gently. “You know what to do.”

“She had a _son_ ,” he whined.

I shuddered at the sight of the wretched mortal that crouched sobbing in maggot-riddled soil and filth. Touching him filled me with disgust, and I pulled back my hand, wiped it on my handkerchief and tossed it away.

“If you want your great-grandson to survive,” I informed him, “you must destroy the mother. Lest you wish him to be visited by a vrykolakas at night, who will straddle his chest and feed on his blood.”

An inhuman cry burst from the old man’s mouth, and he threw his full weight into the mighty strike that pierced the chest of the woman and pinned her body to the bottom of the coffin. I rose to my feet and blessed the grave with the sign of the cross.

“Now,” I said. “Let us collect the heads and commit them to the flames.”

“Aramis,” Athos said in a low voice as we stood concealed in the shadows, watching the pyre eat through the remains of the dead, who would never feed on the blood of the living. “How many of them _were_ vrykolakades?”

“Why are you asking me?” I sneered. “When we have an _expert_ at hand.”

“Flittermouse…”

“I don’t know, Athos.” I turned to him, suddenly angry beyond endurance. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“They are…” He saw the expression on my face, and the words ‘your kind’ froze on his lips.

“They are nothing like me,” I snarled. “Dumb, filthy beasts that skulk in the shadows and feed on peasant blood.” Like the Duke of Alameda, but not like me, nothing like me. “We destroyed _Vangelis_ , Athos. This was never about _them_.”

He blinked, taken aback. “It was about them for me.”

“Why?”

“Because Enyo raised them from their graves by accident. She wanted to tear my mother’s spirit from the afterlife, Aramis. Don’t you understand that?”

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset about it. If I may remind you: _I_ was torn from the afterlife, and you don’t see me complaining. And so were you, for that matter. Why would it be any different for your mother?”

“Because she would suffer,” he spat.

“Like you suffer?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Would you rather be in Elysium, Athos, racing with Achilles, wrestling with Hercules? Palling around with Buddha?”

“They would have tortured her. You don’t know them, Aramis. You don’t know what they are capable of. They… Enyo wanted to use my mother to… get to me.” He was beginning to shake, I could tell, even though he was still shrouded in his divine pride and armour that kept him upright and firm.

“This is not going to happen,” I told him.

“No.”

“We have stopped them. _All_ of them.”

“I know, Aramis.”

“They won’t dare come after us now.” Behind Athos’ back, the flames were licking higher and higher, spiralling towards the skies. An Anemos rushed into the smoke and tore it asunder, blowing tiny clouds in the direction of Olympus.

Before the pyre, Vangelis was on his knees, staring at it with blank eyes. His lips were moving, but no sound emerged. At last.

As if he had sensed us watch him, he turned his head and stared right at Athos and me, and the flames of the pyre that devoured his own flesh and blood reflected in the mirrors of his eyes. Athos took my hand and carried it to his lips, while I raised the cross to my mouth and kissed it. A blast of wind tore at the mantle of Discord and it unfolded around Athos like a pair of deadly wings. Straddling the border between the realm of the dead and the living, Vangelis saw the veil lift. He blinked, blinded by the shine of Achaean armour, and then Discord tilted his head and leaned in to kiss me. His mouth on mine so infinitely familiar; divine energy crackled on his skin, and the beat of his heart sent electric pulses, like tiny thunderbolts, into my flesh. He was powerful, he was deus victor, and I worshipped him with all the fervour of my souls.


	4. The Brothers Karamazov

**Venice, July 1854**

_My beloved cousin-german,_

_It has been many weeks since we exchanged our last adieux and parted – possibly forever – as you and the count snuck out under the cover of night to follow the path of Destiny all the way to Thira. The reports of your exploits have reached us here in Venice, and I applaud you most heartily. Marion sends her love; had she known how the adventure would unfold, she would have happily joined you on your expedition. But as it is, we are very comfortably settled and occupy ourselves with being celebrated and adored – what better fate is a woman to expect?_

_Marion – or, as she calls herself now, Bertha Vyver, for she **is** the Living Bright-One – is a consummate dancer, as you know, and she has taken to the stage like a nymph to water. My own singing voice is much admired; did you know when you joined me for a rendition of _Verranno a te sull’aure_ the day before your departure that you were singing with the rising star of the Venetian opera?_

_Any rising star naturally attracts satellites that circle it like wolves slavering after a piece of particularly juicy manflesh (or woman-flesh, as the case may be). How many offers of “marriage” do you think I have received since the count’s and your departure have left Marion and myself bereft of masculine protection? Verily, the good Dr Vangelis is far from being replaceable! Why, only the other day a hypocritical old fart, having left his good ladywife behind in her confinement, explained to me in great detail how the birth of a child imbues a woman with feelings of a wonderful ecstasy, of beautiful peace and joy, of a love so great that it was as if God had given her something of His Own to hold and keep. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that giving birth does, in fact, resemble a strong attack of the colic, and that having a baby is not at all a romantic business – quite the reverse. They have their uses, of course. But since my ties to the family of Rohan have been severed, what good would an infant be to me in my present situation? I told him that women, with our often overstrung emotions and exaggerated sentiments, are not fit to plunge deeply into studies which tax the brain to its utmost capacity and try the nerves beyond the level of the calm which is essential to health, and that therefore the stage is the way to go._

_Marion danced with him later. We called on the bereaved widow and made friends with her. Her son, should he survive infanthood, may under the right tutelage become a less tiresome man than his late father was._

_You see, dear cousin, that our new, peaceful existence suits us well. It has been rendered even more peaceful following the latest developments in Thira. I heard it whispered on the wind that Dr Vangelis, who used to so selflessly attempt to save my soul from the clutches of the most monstrous abomination that walks the Earth, had taken to his bed, where he lies with his eyes open and his mouth dribbling, spitting out curses and prayers that go unheard. In all that, I recognise the hand of the Bishop of Vannes, and I admit it gives me a thrill of delight to see him so fully restored to his former glory._

_Be well, my beloved cousin-german! Even though you and the count never said that your journey will be a long one, I feel that we shall never see each other again in this life. We smiled when we said farewell, but I cried later that night. Have you ever cried over me? I don’t believe you have. Your black eyes kindle with the fire of diamonds, not that of life. I kiss them still, as ever._

_Yours,_  
_Aglaé M._

***

**The Aegean Sea, June 1854**

“The wind is picking up,” Porthos said, chewing on a piece of salted cod we had loaded up on while on Santorini. Above our heads the sails billowed merrily in the direction of Mount Olympus. “At this rate, we’ll be in Litochoro in a matter of hours.”

“Good,” I replied.

“You’re sure this is a good idea?” Porthos inquired, playing with his scope as he contemplated the horizon in every direction. “I mean, you don’t exactly have the element of surprise on your side, this time.”

“It is a _terrible_ idea,” Aramis muttered behind me. “But you try talking him out of it!”

“She was my _mother_ , Aramis,” I said, grinding my teeth.

“Must be nice to remember one’s mother,” angry footsteps on the quarterdeck, followed by fingers tangling in my hair. “Don’t be angry with me, Athos. I really do not remember mine, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied. I was. It had never occurred to me before, how deep the darkness was from which Aramis had arisen. How much of his humanity his death had robbed him of - we never spoke of it. Only now was I starting to realize why. “You must remember _something_.”

His fingers paused their trek along the outline of my skull, the pressure eased up, and he withdrew his hand.

“Tomato?” Porthos offered, his hands filled with the sun-ripened fruits of my native island. “Santorini is known for having the best tomatoes!”

“How can you be thinking of having a picnic at a time like this?” Aramis asked in exasperation, while popping a bright, red specimen in between his teeth. “Fuck!” he cursed, “These are delicious!” and reached out for more.

“Told you,” Porthos shrugged and extended his hand towards me.

“I can’t let any of the gods get away with what happened on Thira,” I replied, ignoring the proffered treats.

“It isn’t your job to oversee their actions,” Aramis protested. “And besides, didn’t Ares say he had this particular sister under control?”

Bile rose up in my throat. “Ares,” I clenches my teeth around my brother’s name. “I let him live for sentimental reasons. But I do not feel the same way about _Enyo_.”

“Sentimental reasons,” Aramis yawned and stretched, popping another small tomato between his lips. It burst in his mouth much to his apparent delight. “You mean the same reasons that had you letting the whelp of Vangelis live?”

“We do not kill children, Aramis.”

“Fine, we’ll just have to kill him when he’s a grown man. The Fates will take care of it again, no doubt.”

“Olympus,” Porthos proclaimed and passed his scope to me. 

Beneath my feet, the ship lurched and craned along the waves high enough to raise its keel from the waters. Aramis clenched at the ropes next to me.

“Is it supposed to do this?” my beloved gasped, looking upon the turbulent waters.

“There’s a storm coming,” Porthos informed us, eyeing the horizon again. “We should head for the nearest port.”

I took another look towards the port of Litochoro. “We won’t make it. It’s not a real storm.” Above my head, the sails flapped like angry wings of the Eumenides. “It’s the Olympians. They’re defending themselves.”

Porthos raised his eyes to the sky, only to observe the sun blocked out by a sudden gathering of storm clouds.

“Your Da’ is miffed, Athos.”

“Just what I’ve always wanted,” Aramis said with an eyeroll, “To be smote in the middle of the sea by Zeus’ lightning bolts.”

“We’ll be lucky if we get smote before the sea swallows us,” I reassured him with my arm on his shoulder. Beneath us, the ship lurched again along the cresting waves. Salt water splashed against the hull, spraying us liberally. “Porthos, we must strike the sails!”

“Already on it!”

“Great, seawater is hell on my hair!” Aramis declared with the air of a man who refused to show his cards. 

“I won’t let anything happen to you, flittermouse,” I whispered in his ear, pulling him close. He shuddered in my embrace as the ship careened dangerously close to the surface of the water again.

“We’re not going to make it if it gets any worse!” Porthos shouted over the howling of all four of the Anemoi.

“I wish he hadn’t said that,” Aramis whispered as I threw myself towards the ship’s wheel, trying to keep her nose steady. Another powerful wave splashed across the deck, wetting us all from head to toe. A great peal of thunder resounded over my head.

“She’s going to break open on the rocks!” Porthos shouted again from the bow.

“What rocks!” I shouted back.

“The ones your Uncle Poseidon just put in front of us!”

I threw myself against the wheel, laying on the spinning spokes with all my strength. 

“Athos!” Aramis, soaking wet and white as a sheet, was looking at me with dark eyes of desperation. “I won’t let the sea take you from me again!”

The ship spun out of my control and a horrible crash against the prow made us both lose footing, colliding into each other as our bodies hit the deck. 

“I won’t let anything happen to you!” I shouted at Aramis, reaching out to clasp his hand and pull myself towards him, even as the battered ship came apart all around us. I pulled at the coil of ropes around the main mast, and tied one of the ends around my waist. “It will be all right,” I promised, pulling my beloved towards myself and looping the rope around him as well.

“What are you doing?”

“Tying us together so that we don’t get separated,” I explained.

“This is exactly how I died when I was shipwrecked with Odysseus,” I heard Grimley complaining somewhere off to the side. 

“I suppose it’s a good thing you’re immortal now, eh?” Bartleby’s voice responded with supreme calm.

“I will save you, flittermouse,” I whispered against Aramis’ soaked hair, kissing the shell of his ear. “Just like I saved you on Rhodes. I’ll never let you drown.”

“Someone save the tomatoes!” I heard Porthos shout over the wailing of the winds and the roar of the sea.

Aramis’ nails dug into the skin above my hips as he clung to me. “You saved me on Rhodes? What the hell are you talking about?”

“When that Ottoman stabbed you in the head and you fell overboard?” Something flashed in Aramis’ eyes, a dawning of a thought that never occurred to him. “You didn’t know. Of course you didn’t know.”

“Really? _Now_ you tell me!”

“It never came up,” I responded, making sure the rope was tightly tied around us both. “It was mere trifles, Aramis. Just don’t let go of me, all right?”

“That’s why you were in the water that day? That’s why the sea creature _ate_ you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I insisted.

“Swim for the shore!” I heard Porthos’ last command before the ship came apart underneath us and I found myself swallowed by the waves.

The rope uncoiled to its limit and I yanked back on it, until I could grasp Aramis’ hand with my own and we both rose to the water's surface. Lightning pierced the sky and in the resultant blackness of the waters and the thunder clouds, my eyes could not make out the void from the shore.

“Over there!” Aramis’ arm shot past my head, spinning me about in the relentless waves that kept persisting in pummeling and trying to pull us under. I looked in the direction he pointed and saw a glimmer of gold amongst the black. It wasn’t much of a beacon, but it was something to swim for.

I cut through the turbulent water with a series powerful strokes, until I could make out the golden object that we had spotted in the dark. It was my brother’s helmet.

“Give me your hand,” Ares said. Instead, I hesitated, my hand reaching behind me to grasp at Aramis, to make sure he was still with me. “There isn’t time. Let me help you.”

“Athos, for fuck’s sakes!” Aramis hissed at me. “Do it!”

“It’s coming. Give me your hand _now_!”

I reached up and found myself hauled onto the rocky shore. The rope held, and soon I was holding a shivering, soaked Aramis in my arms.

Loud thunder rocked across the skies echoing a wail that rose from the very depths of the sea.

“Come with me,” Ares said and began to clamber over the rocks.

“Where are the others?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.

“You shouldn’t have come here like this,” Ares shook his head. “I told you, I had Enyo under control. There was no need to bring down the wrath of all of the Olympians on yourself.”

“Where is Porthos?”

“Your pet Titan will be fine. It’s not him Father is pissed off at.” He paused and glanced over his shoulder. “You’ve got your important piece with you, don’t you?”

Aramis kept up with us easily even upon the slippery rocks. His eyes burned black in the thunderstorm and his fangs shone brightly illuminated by each bolt of my Father’s lightning.

“Over there,” Ares pointed into a natural harbor beneath the cliffs. “When the storm dies down, you’ll see it: there is a ship moored in there. The crew is headed up north, through the Euxenos Pontos. You will be able to get passage with them.”

“Why are you helping us?”

“I always help you!” my brother proclaimed with divine indignation.

“You honestly believe that?”

Ares folded his arms and his own teeth gleamed in the darkness as he smiled. “I always help you when I can. And besides, I really _enjoyed_ what you just did on Thira. Can’t help but feel a bit responsible too, what with letting the cat out of the bag. Or is it the bat?”

His eyes shot quickly in Aramis’ direction. “Don’t look at him!” I snapped immediately.

“You’ve always been ungrateful,” Ares shrugged. “But at least don’t be stupid. Take the ship and get the hell out of here once they’ve worn themselves out.” He gestured towards the skies and the sea. “It’s always good to have you home, brother,” Ares laughed, a laugh so youthful that for a moment it was easy to forget we stood in the presence of War. “Here,” he took off his cloak and handed it to me. “For your revenant. He doesn’t like water.”

Lightning once again tore through the skies around us, and at the last peal of thunder, Ares was gone.

***

_The Euxenos Pontos. Do you remember, Aramis? When on that shore in Varna, I had watched you watching the waves. And then I had reached out my hand towards you, and you looked upon me as if you were contemplating eating me for dinner. So affronted, my flittermouse, as if I had insulted your honor in the most churlish fashion. You scowled at me, and I lowered my hand. All I had wanted was to touch you. All I had ever wanted was to touch you._

_Wake up, Aramis._

***

The sea, again. The howling of the wind, the lashing of the waves, dark and incessant, reaching out for us with long slimy fingers. I had loved a nymph and I had loved a demigod begotten in the waves of the Aegean, and I had grown tired of the waters. I dreamt of land, of vast stretches of dry grass under an endless sky. Beneath my feet, the boards slanted, my stomach reeled, and my head spun. Had I woken up yet? Or was I stumbling around in the grip of somnambulism, my body pulled and dragged by a power beyond my control, while my mind roamed the realms of Hypnos.

“Athos,” I whispered into darkness. “Are you here?”

“I’m here.”

His fingers on my hand, my wrist, my forearm, but that was no proof. I dreamt of him often when I slept, and my dreams were as vivid and tangible as when they dragged me down into the abyss of the grave.

“I’m here, Aramis.” His voice, his breath against my skin, and then the heat of his body, buttressing me against the sea foam. “Are you cold? You’re shivering.” He leaned in even closer and pressed his lips to my ear. “We should have taken Ares’ cloak. It was dry.”

“No!” I had torn it off my shoulders the moment I had woken, dizzy and disoriented, with grey mist swirling inside my skull. Was that one of War’s tricks? He had put Athos to sleep for centuries – had he attempted the same with me? My mouth tingled and prickled, and I pressed my parted lips to the inside of Athos’ wrist.

His pulse leapt. “It’s yours.” His soft breath stirred my hair.

“I don’t trust him, Athos.”

He hesitated for a moment. “He’s my brother. He’s family.”

“Your family are not exactly trustworthy.”

“Ares was always good- he always helped me.”

“Oh, _Athos_.” I was too tired to argue, my brain too foggy, my limbs too languid. “We must stop it. The warring. As long as you still bring sacrifices to Ares, he remains strong. And as long as he’s strong, he will always try to control you.”

“Even if this is what he does – do you truly think me so weak and feeble-minded that I will _let_ him?”

“Athos-”

“No. Aramis. I am my Father’s son. I am the brother of War. I am the link that keeps the gods of Olympus anchored to the world of humans. This will never change. You might disapprove of the actions of the individual gods, but the ancient order of the Hellenic world is a good and worthy one. Just because one king proves weak or unjust, we do not question the institution of monarchy. Nor should we question the supremacy of the gods.”

“I don’t question the supremacy of the gods,” I told him. “I question _those_ gods. Their era is over, Athos. They have lost and been replaced by a more powerful God.”

“My sweet priestling.” His arms curled around me and he pulled me against his chest. “You’ll never make a good Christian out of me.”

“You’ve picked the losing side, Discord.”

“I have not picked it. It has picked me. I was born into that family, and I will not abandon them.”

“Obviously not,” I muttered, closing my eyes and leaning into his body. “Tell your cousin to stop blowing me quite so hard or I swear on the blood of the Cross that I _will_ find a way to bite him.”

“Cheer up, cuz!” Porthos had crept up on us, moving noiselessly on his bare feet. “Your Da might have given you a rap over the knuckles, but he still loves you, Athos. He even tore the servants from Uncle Poseidon’s slimy grip and spat them out on shore, hardly worse for wear. This is a decent frigate.” He patted the gunwale. “And it’s full of Frenchies going to war for the Holy Land, that’ll keep Ares _and_ Jesus happy!”

I sighed, while Athos’ chest and shoulder shook with soundless laughter. “I’m sorry, Aramis,” he mouthed, pressing kisses into my temple and cheek. He might blame it on Tyche, but I knew better. Oh, Ares knew what he was doing: he had led us straight into the Crimean War.

***

**Odessa, September 1854**

The port city around us buzzed with a nervous energy that still managed to carry an aura of insouciance despite the ongoing war, which threatened to pull this buzzing seaside capital into its fray. Around us, the sounds of spoken French, English, and German, occasionally punctuated by Russian, Greek, and Yiddish. 

“What _is_ this place?” Porthos cast his eyes about him in a state of bewilderment. We had mounted the long staircase with its hidden landings, invisible when beheld from portside. At the top of it, as if greeting the arrivals to port, stood a bronze statue attired in a Roman toga the label of which proclaimed it be that of “Duc de Richelieu”.

“A veritable melting pot,” Aramis pronounced.

I glanced to the right and to the left, beholding the chestnut-lined boulevards and taking in the elegant architecture lining the main streets. Beneath the spectacular stairway, the port hummed amid the surprisingly serene Black Sea.

“It looks just like Paris!” I declared, and that was before I even saw their opera house, which, in all truthfulness, would have given Opera Garnier a run for its money before Opera Garnier had even been built. “Last I heard of it, this was a Greek colony. Is this not the place where the first whispers of the Greek War of Independence begat themselves?”

“Poor Athos, how the world passes you by,” Aramis teased dragging me along the arm down the shaded boulevard. “Odessa belongs to the Czars now.”

“And when were you here last, chyortik?” I asked, squeezing his hand. 

“And, more importantly, how are their women?” Porthos tipped his hat to a passing beauty, who blushed and turned her eyes away from the handsome African pirate as she walked her poodle.

“Pale,” Aramis mused. I noticed that he had not answered my question.

Curiously taken in by our surroundings, I read an inscription on one of the buildings. “It might belong to the Czars but it was clearly built by Frenchmen. Are these too the results of the Horror?”

“The Terror,” both my friends corrected me and I merely scowled upon them.

“I said what I meant.”

“Well I, for one,” Porthos pronounced, “will not be staying here very long. This city might seem beautiful, it might even look like Paris, as you say, but it already feels too northern to me, too… Slavic.” Porthos wrinkled his nose and I had to laugh, casting furtive looks in Aramis’ direction.

“It is slightly more southern than Paris,” Aramis corrected, patiently.

“So, fie! They will have snow here in winter! Give me the Mediterranean or the Caribbean!” Porthos declared with gusto and Aramis and I both shrugged.

“Well, as for myself, I’ve had enough of the sea,” Aramis said, casting suspicious looks towards the maligned body of water. “No more sea, Athos, I beg you! Give me land. Large tracts of land, as far as eyes can see. I want to be landlocked.” His large, kittenish eyes were deployed against me in a manner that would have melted my heart, had it kept any lingering defenses against him to begin with.

“How about we start with finding a place to lodge,” I suggested. “We can discuss our long term plans once we’ve recovered and washed the smell of the fishing boats off of us.”

“Right away, sir. And then I can procure my lords new identities,” Grimley announced with alacrity.

“And I can procure tickets to the Opera,” Bartleby chimed in pointing to a colorful flier upon an advertising column. “They are staging Verdi’s _Macbeth_. Isn’t that a combination of your two favorite things, count?”

“Oh no,” Aramis chuckled. “Will there be much crying?”

“Depends on how good the baritone is,” I growled into his ear just as the clock on the city hall chimed a late afternoon hour and frightened the gathering pigeons.

***

When had I fallen asleep? My limbs were heavy and relaxed, a pleasant warmth coursed through my bones and through my blood, a grounding weight settled over me. Hair brushed across my closed eyelids, then fingers tangled in my curls and warm breath whispered over my neck and my breast bone, followed by the hot press of Aramis’ mouth to the flesh right over my heart.

“Mmmm,” my eyelids fluttered open and my eyes took their time regaining a lazy focus. “Morning, kitten.” His calf brushed up against mine, his knees settled firmly into the mattress, and propelled his body in one smooth motion upwards until his face hovered over mine.

“My love,” he whispered, somber and solemn, as he pressed his lips to my forehead.

My hands were very far away as I dragged my arms back from where I had apparently thrown them open in my sleep, and wrapped them around his tightly corded torso. Eyes of darkest agate in the face as smooth as silk and ageless as the mysterious fire burning inside him. A hundred names I have called him and they all raced through my mind as I watched his expression for the smallest tell of what he was thinking. My angel, my demon, my…

“Hush.”

I had opened my mouth to speak, but instead his finger had pressed against my lips. I allowed my tongue to sneak out and lap against the solitary digit. He smiled and slipped his finger inside, pressing my tongue down, caressing it with soft strokes, his eyes watching my mouth through a half-lidded and foggy daze. Silently, I drew one of my hands over his back, over his shoulder, across the length of his forearm, until I took his hand in mine and pulled it away from my lips. And then his tongue was inside my mouth, exploring with the same inquisitive rigor as his index finger had done before. I tilted my chin up into the kiss, just as eager to be filled with the taste and smell of him all around me. His hair wore a new scent, an oil doubtlessly distilled from some exotic legume that I had never heard of before. I cupped his face and held him close to me, letting my jaw go lax so he could kiss his fill.

“You’re mine,” he whispered right into my mouth as he pulled up.

“Was there any doubt?” I asked, arching up towards him again, my hand cupping the back of his skull so that I could kiss those beautiful lips again, to feel them fill out with blood and desire against my mouth, against my teeth as I bit down gently. That piece of pouty perfection created to fill all the world with envy, that none of them could ever be him, that none of them could ever be _with_ him, not the way that I could.

“ _Mine_ ,” he repeated with insistence, the onyx gleam of his pupils boring into my eyes, while he pressed down against me and I moaned, feeling him fill out against my lower abdomen. The velvety slide of his cock caught against my body hair and I slipped my palm between us to trap him alongside my own growing erection.

I squeezed my hand around us both. “And you are mine,” I said, giving him a tentative smile. He needed something from me, and I was still too sleep-fogged to know exactly what it was. “Aramis,” my other hand pressed into his lower back and he arched like a cat, his ass lifting off into the air for a moment, only to bring his hips firmly against me, burrowing in between my legs with singular insistence. “How do you want me?” I finally asked, letting my thighs fall apart around him, allowing him to settle in between.

His mouth trailed along my jaw, paused to scrape his teeth over my unshaven chin, trailed over the ligaments of my neck that only strained and swelled up as if in response to an inaudible call. A shove against my thighs, and then he slipped a pillow under my hips, elevating them off the mattress. His fingers dragged along the underside of my knees, against my inner thighs, and a full-body shiver claimed me as I settled beneath him, my hands still clinging to his arching back. 

We have coupled with each other in innumerable ways, unthinkable numbers of times from a human perspective, but that action immediately called back a very specific memory for me - of the first time Aramis had allowed me to take him. I suspected he no longer remembered that exact moment in time, for unlike me, Aramis could only keep so much of his memories, and Varna had been centuries ago, when he was just a fledgling incubus lost in his own world and a mere novelty in mine. But I remembered the care I took with him then because even blood-sucking demons had their limits, and somewhere in the back of my mind I had a kind of clarity that I was probing at the limits of his. But he had given himself to me then, and our world spun on its head, it _changed_ at a time when I no longer thought it capable of altering.

“You’re thinking too loudly,” his voice caressed my ear and his thumbs brushed at the furrow that formed between my brows.

“I’m remembering,” I replied, my voice catching in my throat. “What it was like… before I met you.”

“It frightens me,” he said, “that you remember a world in which I did not exist. You _are_ my world. You are…”

“Yours,” I interrupted him, arching up to press my mouth against his. I shut my eyes and drank in the soft moans that passed like a secret between our lips. “Take me.”

His movements were as swift as ever, separating from me only long enough to press back in, his hand covered with something slick, agile fingers pressing inside me as his tongue breached my mouth in a possessive sally. From where he knelt between my thighs, heat rose in a cloud of anticipation and the scent of our joint arousal hung in the air the way pollen hangs in humid drops on a hot summer day. Outside, the wind howled like an enraged wolf, and I opened my mouth to cry out with pleasure as the well-aimed rhythm of his clock sliding home threatened to make me lose all reason. Instead of holding on to the last shred of any self control, I pulled him in tighter with my arms and legs, and surrendered with each sound that he fucked so gloriously out of me. I did not care whose gods could hear me.

***

_To battle, Achaeans, to battle!_

_To ba-ttle, Achae-ans, to bat-tle._

_To bat. Tle. Achae. Ans. To bat. Tle. To bat. Tle. Achae. Ans. To-dub. Thump-dub. Thump-thump. Thump-thump._

My head rang with the pounding of war drums, and I floated up, up on the rhythm, from the darkness of nihil into the light of the morning. Beneath my head, Athos’ heart was thumping against his ribs. The powerful, steady sound, familiar of yore, buoying me, anchoring me when I threatened to drown.

He had saved me from the water grave.

All those centuries, I had believed it was Marie who had saved me from death in Poseidon’s realm, but it had been Athos all along. Athos. Always Athos. He had pulled me out of the darkness of the abyss. I had let in tiny pinpricks of light, and my souls were illumed by celestial flames.

_All those centuries, I had believed I had killed him twice._

I had killed him three times, and three times he had returned to me, faithful and steady. Firm, unyielding, eternal.

“I love you,” I mouthed against the warm, sated skin of his chest. Beneath my lips, his blood heaved, but Athos didn’t wake. With my fingertips, I traced the lines of his ribs, the bulges of muscles and the grooves between his bones; the curve of his shoulder and the soft warmth of his armpit. Athos stirred, but he didn’t wake.

The hot blood in his veins, coursing through this magnificent body; pumping strength and vitality into his limbs and muscles. So much _life_. The power of Olympus trickled down from the gods in the thunderbolts of the sky, in electric currents, and it poured into him like glacial rivers thundering into the sea.

All this power coiled in one human body. When I cupped his hipbone, I could feel the tension in the long cord of the external abdominal oblique, even though it was relaxed in repose.

That mind of his, so adept at bending others to its will, but not like me, not through trickery and bedevilment. “I love you,” I whispered again, soundlessly, parting my lips above his heart as I let its beat guide mine.

When I woke again, Athos was no longer asleep.

“Aramis,” he said, one hand tangled in my hair. “Chyortik, tell me: what is that?” One long, slim finger pointed at the Persian carpet by the bed.

“Oh.” I rolled out of his arms and propped myself up on my elbow. “That. Yes, I was meaning to tell you, but you were asleep when I came back.”

“Yes, sorry about that, flittermouse.”

“No, don’t apologise. It took us longer than expected. You know what Porthos is like at a tailor.”

“I know. That’s why I left you two behind, to get measured and fitted out in peace. Chyortik is not above vanity, I know that.” He smiled and brushed my hair away from my brow.

“And you are not above appearance, count. Don’t pretend it leaves you unmoved.”

“I’m sure your new guise is very fetching. But why did you bring… that?”

“Ah. Yes. You see, Porthos and I had an encounter on our way back. We intended to throw it into the harbour, but there were too many people around. In the end, we thought it wisest to bring it back and let Grimley deal with it.”

Athos sat up and leaned over, scanning the prone body on the carpet from head to foot. “He is dead, I take it.”

“Naturally.”

He sighed and fell back in the pillows. “Why, kitten?”

“He molested us.”

“In what way?”

“He said Ares sent him.”

“Ares!” Athos sat up again and threw himself over the edge of the bed to take a closer look at the corpse. “Is this…”

“Kydoimos.”

_To battle, Achaeans, to battle!_

The din of battle in my head and my blood. It thrummed through Athos too, weaker and weaker, as the spirit of Ares’ minion faded away.

“Was that really necessary?”

“They sent us a warning, Athos. I’ve sent them a warning back. Gods can be killed.”

“Aramis, was that _wise_?”

“Are you afraid of them? Because I am not. They may be stronger on Olympus, but not here. We are stronger here. _You_ are stronger here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are stronger than Ares. He can’t do anything, unless you let him. Not here.”

He looked at me, dark-eyed and serious. For the span of a breath, I saw the words ‘Ares hasn’t done anything’ flutter on his lips, but he never spoke them. His chest rose with a deep breath, and then it fell, and his shoulders relaxed.

Footsteps approached the door, followed by a knock, and then the figure of Porthos, resplendent in his new greatcoat and hat. “Good morning, my dear friends!” he boomed. “What a splendid morning this is. I’m starving and will gladly invite you two to breakfast.” He patted his pocket, which jingled merrily.

“When did you get your hands on money, Porthos?” Athos asked. “And how?”

“And what are you wearing?” I frowned at him, for beneath his greatcoat he wore a woollen waistcoat of a peculiar cut.

“Cardigan!” Porthos exclaimed happily. And, in reply to our quizzical looks, he elaborated: “Earl of Cardigan. English, but a bloody good chap, as the rosbifs say. You know how the English like to gamble, you wave a packet of cards in front of their nose, and they see it as an invitation to give you all their money.” He walked over and prodded the corpse with his foot. “Grimley hasn’t dumped it yet?”

“Grimley hasn’t seen it yet. I wanted to show it to Athos first.”

“You’ve been fraternising with the English?” Athos wrinkled his nose.

Porthos curled the end of his moustache. “Ah, they’re all right. I met a nice young lad on my way back last night, he told me he plans to join the West Africa Squadron once he’s out of here. They capture slave ships and free the captives. I fancy doing that for a while. What do you think?”

Athos and I exchanged a look.

“It sounds good, Porthos,” Athos said. “But I believe Aramis and I will stay on dry land for a while. Won’t we, chyortik?” He took my hand and pressed it. “I can see us riding off into the sunrise over the Russian steppe.” He smiled.

“Suit yourselves,” Porthos shrugged, took out a cigar of an elegant silver case and lit it.

“I’m sick of the sea,” I admitted. “That last voyage – it took us over two months to get from Thira to Odessa.”

“Only because you messed with the gods and they trapped us for a couple of months.” Porthos prodded the corpse again. “I don’t think they’ll be doing that any time soon. Not now after they’ve seen what the good doctor is capable of.” He acknowledged my triumph with a graceful bow in my direction. “What are your plans, then? Stay here and join the Russian army?”

“Why the Russian?” Athos asked. “The French are here, too. We have some experience at being French.”

“I haven’t told you yet, Athos: I took quite a fancy to the Cossack uniform. I believe you will like it once you see it.”

“I’m sure I will, chyortik.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. “But still – the Russians? It’s been four hundred years since we spoke their language, we’ll sound like something out of a medieval manuscript.”

“We’ve grown up in exile and have just returned to the Motherland,” I told him. “We’ll pick it up soon again, and then we can ride off into the Russian steppe. What else do you want to do? Stay here and advise Earl Cardigan on how to command his Light Brigade? For the greater glory of Ares?”

He smiled, and I knew I had won. “Where is that infernal valet?” Athos called, tugging at the bell pull. “We need him to deal with that and to get us our new-”

“Passports, sirs.” The Olympian nuisance stepped over the threshold carrying a tray. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh dear! I believe that calls for Bartleby and his shovel.”

“Don’t be silly, Grimley. Just chuck it into the harbour.”

He gave me a look as if it had been me decomposing on the floor. “And how does sir propose I’ll transport it across town? Wrapped in the carpet?”

“Why not?” I yawned. “I’m sure you’ll think of something, Grimley. You’ve always been most ingenious.”

“Thank you sir. I live to serve.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

He bowed and approached the nightstand, stepping smartly over the body. “Your tea and your passports, sirs.”

“Thank you, Grimley,” Athos said.

“I’ll go and fetch Bartleby, shall I?”

“You do that.”

Meanwhile, I was unfolding the papers with much trepidation and muttering under my nose. “What new horrors… _Athos_!”

“What?” he took the passports from my hand and scanned them. “Karamazov… That’s harmless.”

“Athos! He’s made us _brothers_!”

“Ho ho ho!” Porthos boomed. “Brothers, eh? That is very Olympian. Your family would be so proud!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aramis in his Cossack uniform, gripping his whip and his sword so very hard, would be very much to Athos' liking indeed:
> 
>  


End file.
